One of the Cocoon's readers, Mandi Astola (PhD Candidate, Eindhoven University of Technology), submitted the following guest post:
We are doing interdisciplinarity wrong
A lot of young philosophers are being educated to become interdisciplinary philosophers. And many philosophers scoff at that. Journals that publish interdisciplinary work tend to be seen as less prestigious, as are papers with many co-authors (which is what often happens in interdisciplinary work). There is a sense in which interdisciplinarity can involve a “watering down” of philosophy, which philosophers don’t love.
However, even for all the negatives: the rise of the interdisciplinary philosopher is probably a good thing in the long run. The ecological, technological and political crises that we are facing cannot be solved with single disciplines. It is important that philosophers learn to talk with other disciplines. However, I think that the way in which we are doing it is often counterproductive.
Before I tell you why it’s counterproductive, let me explain how I came to think this. I have worked on an interdisciplinary project, in the role of an ethicist. I also took part in writing a project proposal, where I would have a part as an ethicist. Apart from that, I have been in close contact with various other projects where there was an ethics component. I have always felt a little dissatisfied with the place of philosophy in these projects.
I found that in many of the projects I have seen, the place of philosophy was, in the worst case, as an add-on. In the best case, it was seen as an important perspective, among other important disciplinary perspectives. How should we understand and govern societal phenomenon x? Well, let’s see what the philosopher, the sociologist and the economist think about it and integrate them. Those perspectives would be synthesized into some sort of compromise solution. This might sound like a good democratic way to do research.
However, the problem is that in projects like these, philosophy is constrained to be in service of another non-philosophy question. Philosophy is squeezed into a space where it has no room to breathe. No room to be itself. The result can be a forced collaboration that yields weird research. How should one draw a sociological conclusion using philosophy? After all, sociological conclusions are by necessity based on empirical research, not philosophy. A philosophical conclusion is not empirical data, or a conclusion based on empirical data. So how can it contribute to a sociological study in a significant way? If all disciplines are equal, then is interdisciplinarity just letting them fight it out?
We seem to have forgotten something important, namely, the natural hierarchy of the disciplines. Let us remember what we learned as undergraduates. What discipline is the parent of all the sciences? What is at the top of the knowledge hierarchy? Philosophy! And what did Aristotle say was at the top of the hierarchy of the arts? What do all arts culminate in? Ethics! One learns to heal the sick, because one believes health is good. One learns a craft, because it produces something valuable. Ethical and philosophical questions are the questions of questions, in which all other knowledge eventually culminates. The empirical sciences are in the service of philosophy, and all arts are in the service of ethics.
Perhaps it sounds old fashioned, but why not have philosophy by default in the lead of interdisciplinary projects? An ethical question, like “what should the government do about x?” needs to be broken down into various sub questions in a philosophically informed method. These sub-questions can be answered using various empirical sciences. That way the disciplines find their natural place in the tree of knowledge, yielding research that makes sense. Philosophy should take its proper place at the leading end of the other disciplines.
It also helps that the important societal questions that interdisciplinarity is supposed to be the solution for, are also philosophical questions. “How should we deal with the energy transition?” “How should we deal with the rise of populism?” “What does it mean to be sustainable?” These are all philosophical questions that involve empirical subquestions. Philosophers should determine the former and other scientists and scholars the latter.
I realize that this sounds self-important and control-freakish. It sounds like I want to be a philosopher queen, ruling over everyone else with my superior wisdom. But philosophy is after all a discipline that concerns itself with, as Sellars is quoted saying, “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” It is therefore the very essence of philosophy to lead inquiry. That does not mean it is the most important discipline, just that it is the one that should lead the others in conceptualizing the broadest lines of collective inquiry.
This means that we interdisciplinary philosophers desperately need to develop leadership skills. We need to be either initiating interdisciplinary projects or pushing ourselves to the forefronts of such projects. Otherwise the project loses the distinctive benefits of philosophy.
Allow me to share a few quick reactions before opening things up for discussion. On the one hand, I appreciate the general sentiments behind Astola's piece: namely, that in some sense interdisciplinary research projects should be guided by philosophical reasoning, rather than have philosophy attached to such projects as an afterthought. There are, after all, notable historical precedents of philosophy playing a critical role in empirical findings. Einstein, for example, was led to the Theory of Relativity in part by reading Hume, whose empiricism led Einstein to be skeptical of a priori accounts of space and time. Indeed, as a result of reading Hume and Mach, Einstein pretty much adopted a positivist outlook on things, reasoning that scientific claims about space and time must reduce to what is verifiable through measurements. Einstein then took the step of inferring that because the observed speed of light is the same in all reference frames, clocks and other measures of time must move at different speeds relative to different reference frames. Einstein wasn't the first to notice that this is what observations imply (Poincaré realized it as well). Einstein simply took the further step in inferring that this implies that space and time themselves are actually relative. Hence, we very much owe the theory of relativity and all of the practical innovations it has led to (such as GPS) to philosophy.
So, it seems, there's a real case to be made that philosophy should play a leading role in interdisciplinary work. Still, I have two concerns: one practical and the other more principled. The practical concern is that telling our interdisciplinary collaborators that our projects with them should be led by philosophy does sound "self-important and control-freakish." Or, at least it runs a serious risk of rubbing our interdisciplinary colleagues the wrong way. My general experience is that people in general tend to think their own discipline is super important. For example, physicists routinely trash philosophy, contending that its their field that makes the real, important progress, not ours. Suffice it to say, trying to stake out this kind of superiority doesn't seem all that conducive to effective collaboration. Effective collaboration normally requires collaborators to feel treated as equals. And indeed, this sort of seems to be what animates Astola's complaint in the first place: namely, that in her experience in interdisciplinary collaborations, philosophy often seems treated like an afterthought. Anyway, that's my practical concern: that to work well with interdisciplinary collaborators, it's probably not best to approach such collaborations from the general perspective that philosophy should take the lead. It may well be possible to overcome this practical hurdle in some cases–for example, cases where philosophers are the main grant-holders (such as in some Templeton grants and such)–but in that case we run into other concerns: namely, concerns about the manner in which private grants might steer projects according to the values of the granting agency.
Finally, I have some principled concerns about the idea that philosophers should lead interdisciplinary collaborations. One of the main complaints that scientists often have about philosophy, after all, is a complaint that many philosophers raise: namely, that philosophical methods aren't reliable or truth-apt. If, as many of our scientific collaborators contend, the sciences generally have superior methods for arriving at the truth, we might wonder whether interdisciplinary collaborations ought to be led by practitioners of methods that, in general, appear to be less truth apt.
In any case, I thank Astola for submitting her thought-provoking post, and I'm curious to hear what readers think. It might be particularly illuminating to hear from other philosophers who have worked in interdisciplinary collaborations!
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