Multi-Disciplinary Mindset and Cross-Disciplinary Claiming

I’ve been doing a bad job posting regularly. Part of this is due, I think, to expecting too much of my blog posts, so to counteract this I will be writing only short posts for a while (<300 words).

I’ve been reading a lot about interdisciplinarity recently, which has forced me to think more carefully about my own method. One distinction I keep coming upon (my phraseology) separates adopting a multi-disciplinary mindset from merely doing cross-disciplinary claiming. As with most distinctions, this one is artificial and banal, and certainly isn’t helpful for everything. However, it seems useful for some cases, so I’ve continued to use it as motivation to continually “do better” in my own work.

A crude example: the “constructivity” of memory and the accuracy of scientific beliefs. Some philosophers of science claim that the so-called constructivity of memory suggests a brand of scientific instrumentalism is appropriate. Insofar as this is leveraging another discipline’s research for more-or-less foreign purposes, this is clearly a case of claiming something (for one’s own purposes) across disciplines. As it stands, this also seems to me to be merely cross-disciplinary claiming: no serious effort is made to connect the particularities of the claimed research to the goal at hand, the claimant instead relying on the obviousness of the connection.

In contrast, one who’s also adopted a multi-disciplinary mindset would be attuned–in perpetuity!–to the precarities of the borrowed claim. For one, they would be aware that (in loose terms) emotion plays a significant, variegated and not-fully-understood role in memory (re)consolidation, and that this complication is largely ignored in the literature most accessible to the lay-philosopher. And further knowing that emotion plays a deep role in science, they would likely boggle at any “constructivity implies instrumentalism” claim. (Not to mention: what does it mean to be an instrumentalist, really?)

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Chris Mitsch

Chris studies the history and philosophy of science and mathematics. He is currently translating several works by Hilbert, Nordheim, and von Neumann as part of a project on the philosophy of mathematics that informed early quantum mechanics formalisms. He is also interested in: historical method and how this should inform general philosophy of science; the cognitive foundations of mathematics; and the construction of identity in (especially American) politics. Chris posts under the banner "Method Matters".