Prompted by discussions with my son Peter about the limits of interdisciplinary knowledge, (he has just finished a university program in knowledge integration) I wanted to know more about the problems arising from using metaphors outside their appropriate context. I found Kellert a helpful illustration of issues we were discussing. See also 2013-07-16, notes on Kellert, Harry Collins and the SEE project, the periodic table of expertises, and the expertise space domain.
The discussion with my son Peter, who is writing about the need
for full disclosure of non-epistemic values in research, began with his
diatribe against generalist authors like Azar Gat[1]
(who as a military historian has no business summarizing arguments about
evolutionary propensities for violence) and Steven Pinker (who Peter believes
makes broad claims for evolutionary psychology as a cause for the decline of
violence, although I read him as emphasizing institutional evolution,
institutions in the broadest sense as means of organizing social behaviour).
What follows is really thinking through some of the issues
involved in preparing professionals without a coherent disciplinary foundation
(e.g. military and police officers) for real-world problem-solving and
practical study while drawing on partial knowledge of a wide range of
potentially useful disciplines
Multi-, Inter-, and Trans-disciplinary work
Dimensions of Expertise
Peter is right that Pinker has provoked criticism. See, for
example, John Gray, “Delusions of Peace” (http://www.bresserpereira.org.br/Terceiros/2011/11.09.Gray-Against-Pinker-Delusions_of_peace.pdf
) [2]
and the authors reviewed by Kitwood (2012) below:
· KITWOOD, N. "Under the long
shadow of Rousseau and Hobbes, scientists debate whether civilization spurred
or inhibited warfare—and whether we have the data to know." (2012)
· Robbins Schug, Gwen, et al.
"A peaceful realm? Trauma and social differentiation at Harappa."
International Journal of Paleopathology 2.2 (2012): 136-147.
· Kuckelman, Kristin A., Ricky R.
Lightfoot, and Debra L. Martin. "Changing patterns of violence in the
northern San Juan region." The Kiva (2000): 147-165.
· Milner, George R., Eve Anderson,
and Virginia G. Smith. "Warfare in late prehistoric west-central
Illinois." American Antiquity (1991): 581-603
We don’t
have the data to know for sure how small groups interacted – sometimes they
were peaceful and sometimes they were violent, so you can’t aggregate numbers
and generalize as Pinker does.
But the
more general point concerns claims to knowledge, and Peter’s rejection of multi-disciplinary
synthesis (like Pinker). I have deliberately sought out authors like Pinker and
Gat, who popularize broad interdisciplinary studies. From his knowledge-integration background, he
believes that they cannot usefully integrate the knowledge as individuals, and
only coherent team studies are likely to produce useful results. If this is true, then it may have
implications for how I put the pieces together for the NSP book – less time
spent solo and more time spent on network building and checking. It may inevitably drive me towards edited
collections for detailed knowledge (already part of the plan in the context of
series…)
See jnl
2013-07-16 claims to knowledge.pptx
Figure 1
interdisciplinarity at various levels of generalization (see below on
"esotericity" - this is inverse)
In
building networks, you need to seek out people with contributory and
interactional expertise. People like THD
have interactional expertise on environmental science and contributory
expertise on policy and politics. What are my areas of contributory and interactional
expertise? Probably narrower than I like to think…
Part of
the problem is that specialists may actively reject the paradigms and evidence,
or simply passively ignore or dismiss it. As Bruce Berman said of the MCRI
project, there were very few of the academics involved who would actually
consent to “play with others”.
Figure 2 specialization (or esotericity) and
capacity to assess claims to knowledge
Peter
suggested a useful relationship between degree of specialization and capacity
to assess claims to knowledge, illustrated in Figure 2 specialization (or esotericity) and capacity to assess claims to
knowledge.
The “Einstein problem” is that few people understand the knowledge
adequately. The “Francis Bacon” problem
is that few people know enough to integrate effectively. These two problems go along with Figure 3 – the tiny audience is the
Einstein problem, while the wide popular audience is the Francis Bacon problem
(or the Stephen Pinker problem) – lots of people read it and believe it to be
reasonable, but a much smaller group is in a position to correctly assess it.
The concept of “correct” assessment is a problem. In the social sciences, much of what passes
for knowledge is contested. Definitions
of violence, equality, justice, democracy, war, failed states and all the
measures that accompany these are disputed by camps of specialists who are
divided by value more than epistemology.
Consider the Annales
school of French social and economic historians (e.g. Braudel,[3]
Ladurie,[4]
Bloch,[5])
in comparison to the World System Perspective which evolved over the same
period and a bit later in the English speaking world (Wallerstein,[6]
Bergeson,[7]
Rubinstein, etc). Both stressed the
interrogation of “evidence”, or the secular cycles[8]
described by Peter Turchin’s “cliodynamics,” which looks like a recent
application of the “cliometrics” (data-mining applied to economic history) that
netted Fogel and North a Nobel prize in economics in 1993.[9]
Each of these broad fields of knowledge
consists of hundreds of scholars, thousands of articles and chapters, and
scores of journals. Within this broad base defined by approach, I think there
is some cross-fertilization based on subject, but there is also a constraint of
efficiency: since they can’t read everything, scholars concentrate on the
literature within their field, and only cross fields when it offers an
advantage to understanding their particular problem.[10]
Thus, although all of the authors listed above (Braudel, Ladurie, Wallerstein,
Turchin, etc, and the much longer list of lesser knowns) are in the general
field of political and economic history, they haven’t necessarily engaged each
other or learned from each other – life is too short.
Figure 3 Audience size and specialization
Now if we move from the triangle labeled
“political-economic-historical studies” to the field of multiple triangles each
representing a discipline, permeability is even less. This raises the problem
of disciplines – how are these pyramids of knowledge constructed, and how do
you integrate them to solve real-world problems, as Kersbergen et al (2004)
amongst many others suggest is necessary?
Where did the disciplinary silos, and their sub-fields come
from in the first place? In The Chaos of Disciplines, Abbott (2001)
describes the fractal nature of social and cultural groups, of which academic
disciplines are an example, and posits that this natural fractioning explains
how knowledge advances (or changes over time – presumably advancing if we get
it right):[11]
“If we take any group of
sociologists and lock them in a room, they will argue and at once differentiate
themselves into positivists and interpretivists. But if we separate those two
groups and lock them in separate
rooms, those two groups will each in
turn divide over exactly the same issue…Thus cultural structures too may have
the characteristic of self-similarity…self-similarity provides a general
account of how knowledge actually changes in social science…” (ix-x)
So if Abbot is right, the infinite fracturing of
disciplinary silos is a continuous and inevitable process, but the principle of
self-similarity suggests that any particular category of scholar in one silo
(narrativist, interpretivist, positivist, Marxist, etc) will be able to find
fellow-travellers in many other silos, based on the way they think if not on
the subject of their study. Humans being what they are, some reach out and some
don’t; sometimes it’s planned and sometimes it’s serendipitous. The various labels surrounding
multi-discipline studies are efforts to describe a continuum of the extent to
which scholarship is isolated or interconnected across disciplines.
Disciplines “can be identified…by their objects of study
(domains, phenomena), by their cognitive tools (theories, techniques) or by
their social structure (turf, journals) (Kellert, 2009, 2:7/49, citing Bechtel
1987, 297 and Hayles 1990, 191). Depending on the elements you use in a
definition, “discipline” can correspond more or less to the domains of
traditional university departments: math, chemistry, physics, sociology,
psychology, history, etc. But if you
focus just on the objects of study, or the social structure, then area studies,
legal studies, environmental studies, women’s studies, war studies, etc. can
also be defined as disciplines, and indeed have their own journals and
sometimes departments.[12] This brings us back to Abbott (2001) and The Chaos of Disciplines, fracturing and
reforming.
We had a discussion multidisciplinarity in the
SSHRC-sponsored Major Collaborative Research Project, and I think the outcome was
typical amongst traditional disciplines.
It wasn’t a very diverse group – almost all political scientists and
historians of one stripe or another, with a heavy dose of normative
philosophers. A simple view is that a
multidisciplinary study involves several disciplinary specialists each looking
at a problem separately (more or less what we did). An interdisciplinary study
involves mutual learning across the disciplines, so (for example) a
sociological understanding informs collection of economic data, for analysis
within a political or legal framework. Transdisciplinarity is an effort to
achieve holistic understanding of reality beyond the boundaries of disciplines.
There’s a good Wikipedia entry on transdisciplinarity with reference to Piaget
(1970) and the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (CIRET)
established in 1987, which still seems to be in business “The aim of our
organization is to develop research in a new scientific and cultural approach -
the transdisciplinarity - whose aim is to lay bare the nature and
characteristics of the flow of information circulating between the various
branches of knowledge.” (http://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/index_en.php).
But genuinely transdisciplinary work seems to be both rare
and problematical. It is rare because both motivation and capability are
necessary. Motivation is limited because of incentives to be expert in a disciplinary
field in order to have a university job.
Capability is rare because it requires levels of expertise across
disciplines that can take decades to acquire, or may be impossible beyond two
or three domains. In the absence of that sort of expertise, transdisciplinarity
is problematical because it can lead to bad science and conclusions disputed by
experts (and Peter’s critique of the generalists). I think one reason that this
happens is that transdisciplinarity requires compromises and homogenization of
approach. “Disciplinary pluralism” may
be a reasonable alternative.
Kellert (2009)[13]
illustrates the problems and value of borrowing from the natural sciences to
think about social sciences and humanities by using chaos theory. Social sciences borrow concepts and metaphors
from natural sciences, sometimes applying them appropriately, and sometimes
not. Kellert is a professor of
philosophy who has written mainly about chaos and its applications in science. Kellert’s
Chapter 2 in Borrowed Knowledge,
“disciplinary pluralism,” provides a good explanation of levels of analysis
related to the sort of questions asked:
level 0 is the object or phenomena under study; at level 1 are the
disciplines that investigate these objects of study; at level 2 are methodology
and epistemology – questions about the disciplines in level 1 – how are we to
know what is really going on? Are the representations accurate or heuristic
fictions? At level 3 we find what Kellert calls questions of meta-methodology
and meta-philosophy – e.g. how do we resolve conflicts of modeling, data
collection or method? He goes on to justify scientific pluralism for level 1
and 2 questions: “The scientific pluralist stance defends the peaceful coexistence
of incompatible theories and approaches within a discipline. Similarly,
disciplinary pluralism invites the use of techniques from multiple disciplines
to understand the subject matter…” (Kellert, 2009, 2:6/49).
This brings us to the kinds of expertise represented in
different fields at different levels of specialization. Looking for information on claims to expert
knowledge, I found a project originating early in the 2000s, Studies in Expertise and Experience (SEE).
The purpose of the project is policy-oriented, as much aimed
at limiting technical-elite decision-making (in order to privilege democratic
engagement) as improving the integration of expertise. Collins and Evans (2002)
seem to be the originators:
“Science studies has shown us why
science and technology cannot always solve technical problems in the public
domain. In particular, the speed of political decision-making is faster than
the speed of scientific consensus formation. A predominant motif over recent
years has been the need to extend the domain of technical decision-making
beyond the technically qualified élite, so as to enhance political legitimacy.
We argue, however, that the `Problem of Legitimacy' has been replaced by the
`Problem of Extension' - that is, by a tendency to dissolve the boundary
between experts and the public so that there are no longer any grounds for
limiting the indefinite extension of technical decision-making rights. We argue
that a Third Wave of Science Studies - Studies of Expertise and Experience
(SEE) - is needed to solve the Problem of Extension. SEE will include a
normative theory of expertise, and will disentangle expertise from political
rights in technical decision-making. The theory builds categories of expertise,
starting with the key distinction between interactive expertise and contributory
expertise. A new categorization of types of science is also needed. ….” [14]
In what
appears to be an unpublished paper from about 2011, Collins extends the
analysis of different types of expertise in three dimensions. First, he explores the dimension of
specialization. Figure 4 “The Periodic Table of
Expertises” describes a series of dichotomies and continuums that are related
mainly to expertise and specialization of knowledge.
Figure 4 From Harry Collins and the SEE
project
“The underlying idea of the
Periodic Table is that the acquisition of nearly every expertise, if not all of
them, depends on the acquisition of the tacit knowledge pertaining to the
expert domain in question. Tacit knowledge
can be acquired only by immersion in the society of those who already possess
it. Therefore, the process of moving to
the right hand end of the Specialist Expertises line depends on becoming
socially embedded in the appropriate groups of experts so that one can acquire
`specialist tacit knowledge’ (as indicated in the grey heading). The process is social though the outcome is
real – an ability to do and understand things that one could not do and
understand before.
“The two right hand categories of
the Specialist Expertise line indicate that there are two kinds of
socialisation that can lead to two kinds of specialist expertise. The rightmost category – contributory
expertise – is what is normally thought of as an expertise and it is the
practical expertise that enables one to contribute to a domain of
practice. To acquire contributory
expertise one must work within the expert domain. Interactional expertise, on the other hand,
can be acquired by deep immersion in the linguistic discourse of the domain
alone. At first thought of as a kind of
subsidiary expertise, interactional expertise is now seen, at least by some
such as the author, as more and more the essence of human collective practices
and social life in general. For example,
it has been argued that without interactional expertise we would all live
isolated lives, our understanding bounded by just those things we had practised
ourselves…” (Collins, Three Dimensions of Expertise, nd, circa 2011)
Figure 5 from Harry Collins again...
He then goes on to explain how expertise can be described in
three dimensions, based on specialization, exposure to tacit knowledge, and
accomplishment based on the expertise.
“In [Figure 5
Expertise-Space Diagram], the depth dimension is what used to be the (mostly)
single-dimensional model of expertise but now refers to groups and domains as
well as individuals. The horizontal
dimension is the extent of exposure to tacit knowledge, once more, referring to
either groups or individuals, depending on how the diagram is used. The vertical dimension is the extent to which
the domain is esoteric with
ubiquitous domains, such as language-speaking or literacy at the bottom and
things like gravitational wave physics at the top.” (Collins, p. 7, ibid) Collins goes on to explain how the
expertise-space diagram can be used.
What can we say about security expertise in the ESD? Military and police probably have comparable
trajectories, and degrees of esotericity (why not “specialization”?) peak at
the tactical/operational level, e.g. gunners, communicators, crime-scene
investigators, etc. This probably happens fairly early in a career –
Sergeant/Warrant or Captain/Major. As officers/leaders
move up to mid-career, they have to generalize in order to integrate the
specialized knowledge of subordinates, and their general expertise is more
readily transferable to other domains, hence the normal compatibility of
police, military, (and maybe business and government) in management,
leadership, planning and execution of operations in the broadest sense.
This seems very familiar, perhaps from a diagram in one of
Al Okros’s presentations, or a Training Development Officer (TDO) scheme that illustrates different levels and
forms of expertise at different stages in a career. My conclusion is that synthesizing fields of knowledge is absolutely necessary and occurs naturally in pursuit of applied knowledge, as in the security field, but that Kellert is right - it's often done badly. Collins and the SEE project distinctions probably help us to integrate the knowledge forms that Kellert suggests can trip up applied knowledge. Of course, this discussion is probably too esoteric for mid-career professionals looking for practical tools, although it might be reduced to a conceptual snippet with real-world examples that might serve as a warning.
David Last, 16 July 2013
Notes:
[1] Gat, Azar. War in human civilization. Oxford
University Press, 2008.
[2] Gray, John. "Delusions of peace."
Prospect21 (2011). [John Gray is another
historian.]
[3] Braudel, Fernand. La dynamique du capitalisme. Vol.
19. Paris: Arthaud, 1985.
[4] Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy. Le territoire de
l'historien. Vol. 2. Gallimard, 1973; Ladurie, Emmanuel LeRoy. "Motionless
history." Social Science History 1.2 (1977): 115-136
[5]Bloch, Marc Léopold Benjamin. French rural history: an
essay on its basic characteristics. Vol. 28. University of California Pr, 1966.
[6] Wallerstein, Immanuel, ed. The capitalist
world-economy. Vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1979.
[7] Bergeson, Albert. "Modeling Long Waves of Crisis
in the World-System." CRISES IN THE WORLD-SYSTEM. London: Sage
Publications (1983).
[8] Turchin, Peter, and Sergey A. Nefedov. Secular cycles.
Princeton University Press, 2009.
[9] "for having renewed research in economic history
by applying economic theory and quantiative methods in order to explain
economic and institutional change." http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1993/press.html
[10] This is my cursory understanding from: Kersbergen, Kees
van, and Frans van Waarden. "‘Governance’as a bridge between disciplines:
Cross‐disciplinary inspiration regarding shifts in governance and problems of
governability, accountability and legitimacy." European journal of
political research 43.2 (2004): 143-171, and Moed, Henk, Wolfgang Glänzel,
and Ulrich Schmoch. "Editors’ Introduction." Handbook of
Quantitative Science and Technology Research (2005): 1-15.
[11] Abbott, Andrew. Chaos of disciplines.
University of Chicago Press, 2001.
[12] This is suggested by references in Kellert, in these
“studies” fields, multidisciplinarity is essential, and interdisciplinary work
“has almost become de rigueur…”
(Moran, 1997, 155) Moran, Jay P. "Postmodernism's Misguided Place in
Legal Scholarship: Chaos Theory, Deconstruction, and Some Insights from Thomas
Pynchon's Fiction." S. Cal. Interdisc. LJ 6 (1997): 155.
[13] Kellert, Stephen H. Borrowed knowledge: Chaos
theory and the challenge of learning across disciplines. University of
Chicago Press, 2009.
[14] Collins, Harry M., and Robert Evans. "The Third
Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience." Social
studies of science 32.2 (2002): 235-296.
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