The Future Directions workshop of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology was held on the University of San Francisco campus last week, and it was a resounding success.
The workshop was the first "off year" meeting sponsored by the Society, and so was experimental. The workshop emphasized topics of interest to graduate students, such as finding a job and publishing strategies, although there were just as many sessions devoted to technical issues.
It's clear that many people are eager to organize workshops in years to come, and this should certainly become a routine part of the Society's activities.
I moderated a session on "Interdisciplinary issues", and presented a brief comment, which I'm posting here.
A discussion of the workshop is being held on the Philosophy of Biology blog, with an open thread for comments (which are, of course, welcome here too.
Doing interdisciplinary work
(Comments at the roundtable on Interdisciplinary Issues, FDISH conference, San Francisco, 24 September 2004).
Research progresses by constantly refining and re-posing the problems it addresses, and improving methods, concepts and theories used to address them. So the lines of work which make up the research world are quite fluid, constantly shifting and forming new connections with (and against) one another. Doing research well means following (or, better, leading) at least some of these changes.
Disciplines are made of arrangements anchored in university organizations, in associations and their bureaucracies, in journals and their publishers, in sponsors and government agencies, and so on. These organizations have many commitments which limit the speed and direction of the changes they can make. In every university department, for example, certain courses must be taught-- and this means that someone to teach them must be hired, even if other subspecialties are more promising. Nor can any university or sponsor afford to invest most of its resources in a single, relatively new approach.
So the state of the art in any research area is always changing faster than the system of formal organizations which support it. In consequence, there are always intellectual connections being made across organizational boundary lines, and sometimes in opposition to them. Because of this, we find ourselves bound to collaborators who make simple mistakes in our field, and we find we are expected to know all sorts of technicalities which have been irrelevant before. And when all those difficulties are worked out, we find ourselves evaluated by the folks back home, who are largely ignorant of and indifferent toward, the subtleties which we have so painfully mastered.
So we have an inevitable trade-off. On the one hand, we'd like an all-out commitment to intellectual honesty and productivity, to posing and solving and reporting on research problems as best we can. On the other hand, we go through steps we need to manage our careers in a more-or-less entrenched organizational structure whose inertia can pose economic and political barriers to movement.
In short, there's a trade-off between intellectual honesty and economic rationality, and this produces an irreducible dilemma for interdisciplinary research no matter how we draw the boundaries among disciplines.
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