ISR’s Intellectual Project

This issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews celebrates 40 years of uninterrupted publication. It is appropriately stocked with articles derived from reports submitted to the Andrea von Braun Stiftung, which is dedicated to ‘support of interdisciplinary cooperation and mutual stimulation among different fields of knowledge’ (www.avbstiftung.de). The issue is edited by Dr Christoph-Friedrich von Braun, Managing Director of the Foundation and a member of ISR’s Editorial Board for many years.

The first issue of ISR was published on 29 March 1976, when the founding Editor, Anthony Michaelis, handed out copies of the journal during a press conference held at the Royal Society in London (Michaelis 2001, 316). Now, almost exactly four decades later, seems the right moment to take stock of ISR’s purpose and direction, hence this Editorial. When I became Editor almost eight years ago I had already been a friend of the journal for seven years, my able predecessor Howard Cattermole wrote in his farewell editorial (33.2), so ISR has been on my mind even longer. Yet apart from the odd statement as Editor I have not articulated explicitly what I think that purpose and direction are. These have seemed clear to me from what ISR has in fact quietly been doing. But thanks to recent discussions with members of the Board, I have realized that the growing prominence of ‘interdisciplinarity’ during the last decade and ISR’s gradual expansion of scope into the arts and humanities, well underway in my predecessor's time, bring about an opportunity and a need explicitly to say what this journal is now for.

Remarkably much remains the same since Michaelis began ISR in the conviction that communicating and exploring across disciplines would yield great benefits, as it had before him. In his first editorial he noted that ‘interdisciplinary’ was ‘a relatively new term, although its concept reaches back to the very beginnings of modern science’ (1976, iii). Indeed the practice reaches further back than Bacon and Galileo, as for example G. E. R. Lloyd demonstrates in his many cross-cultural studies of ancient science. Powered by curiosity, strengthened by bravery and sharpened by critical wit, inquiry has always wanted to go where significant questions have led. But the going has always also meant risk and has encountered resistance. ‘Curiosity has never been allowed free rein’, Lorraine Daston reminds us (2005, 36). The question is not whether but how the difficulties are manifested. Lloyd follows the struggle in The Ambitions of Curiosity (2002) between the freedom to look anywhere, ask anything, and the beholdenness which ensures continuity across time. Thus (to borrow from Thomas Kuhn) ‘the essential tension’ of interdisciplinary research. Curiosity's ambitions ‘were often just that, just ambitions’, Lloyd comments. ‘But what ambitions: for in one context after another, they held out the hope of understanding what had never been understood before’ (2002, 147). They still do. And so, steadily, unwaveringly, ISR’s historical context and central purpose.

At its beginning, my predecessor tells me and Michaelis’ book The Scientific Temper (2001) amply documents, ISR was ‘an early, high-end organ of the public understanding of science, almost before that term had any currency’.¹ Now it is a much more serious intellectual project, but it has grown from and developed, not discarded, its inheritance. This inheritance is distinctly legible in the three aims for the journal that Michaelis laid out in his inaugural issue: first, to bring out the relationship between the sciences and technology on the one hand and human societies on the other; second, to demonstrate the meaning of ‘interdisciplinary’ in reviews of research understandable by the contributors’ colleagues and by those further afield; third, to bring out historically and philosophically the cultural significance of scientific work and its relationships with the arts, music and literature. These objectives remain, though the balance among them has shifted from the magnanimous scientist's reaching out toward the interpretative disciplines and arts. At least since my predecessor's time, ISR has expanded its scope to take in the scholar's and artist's reciprocal reach. In a nutshell, the journal has striven increasingly to provide and develop a forum where interdisciplinary research between the sciences, the arts and humanities can be reviewed and discussed. The balance has also in consequence shifted toward greater emphasis on the unhelpfully maligned ‘lone’ scholar's work across disciplines and cultures. More about that later.

ISR’s gradual change is part of a much larger dilation of interest and attempts in society and academia. The scope and diversity of interests denoted by ‘interdisciplinary’ has grown from early twentieth-century stirrings in the social sciences to major publications, such as The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (Frodeman et al. 2010), whose second edition is forthcoming later this year. Indeed, ‘interdisciplinarity’ is in some contexts (such as CVs and grant applications) invoked as if it were a transcendental good. It is often paired with another, ‘collaboration’, which at least in the humanities is quite poorly understood though fulsomely claimed. There is much handwaving in those disciplines and little concrete understanding of its history in the sciences.

‘Interdisciplinarity’ appeared as a draft addition in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1993: ‘the quality, fact, or condition of being interdisciplinary’. I take the word to name a vigorous field of activity in urgent need of critical study. ISR has from time to time published articles on the subject and continues to welcome them. But — here is a defining point for this journal — interdisciplinarity itself is not ISR’s focus, at least not directly. Since the beginning and throughout its history ISR’s purpose has not been to say what interdisciplinarity is but to exhibit what happens when a researcher starts from a discipline of origin and expands into others, whether in real-time collaboration or through the writings of those who have gone before. ISR refrains from identifying wholly with the popular conversations on interdisciplinarity not because ‘the quality, fact, or condition of being’ they discuss is not in need of critical thought but because, as the abstract noun suggests, such discussion tends to reify a process of becoming as if it were simply achievable, like satiety after eating, and so to conceal the struggle which ISR exists to explore. Many years ago Stanley Fish argued, I think cogently, that the perfectly neutral standpoint to which he saw interdisciplinarians aspire — a disciplinary panopticon, if you will — is not merely impossible but a dangerously misleading chimaera that would naturalize one's native intellectual framework (1989). Where his argument fell short was in asserting that because that perfectly neutral standpoint is impossible the effort should not be undertaken. ISR was founded in the belief, and continues in it supported by its Editorial Board past and present, that becoming interdisciplinary is the norm of inquiry and that its shape is best understood in the never-ending struggle to extend that with which one begins. Northrop Frye wrote in On Education that ‘every field of knowledge is the centre of all knowledge, and that it doesn't matter so much what you learn when you learn it in a structure that can expand into other structures’ (1988, 10). He was, I think, giving us a secular version of a mediaeval definition of God, circumferentia nusquam, centrum ubique, ‘circumference nowhere, centre everywhere’. Not a bad analogy on which to base one's intellectual career, precisely because it is simultaneously fundamental and impossible.

The difficulties and perils involved in this expanding, especially competence, have been discussed far better than I can by one of its most inspiring practitioners, Board member Dame Gillian Beer, to whose writings I refer you (e.g. 2006; 1996, 115–45). But we all already know, or should own up to, the uneasiness from venturing into a subject one must speak to but cannot without another lifetime become competent in. The proliferation of primary and secondary sources online tempt us, push us (and our students) to venture ever further from our disciplines of origin. The question is not whether this happens but how to do it well. It is not a question we can afford to ignore. It is ISR’s mandate to pursue.

I spoke earlier of bravery as well as curiosity and vigilant self-criticism in this struggle to become interdisciplinary. By definition we find ourselves in foreign lands, ignorant if not of local idiom then of unspoken, perhaps unspeakable customs and assumptions. What we as foreigners must want is not to proclaim in seamless argument but to invite conversation from which both stranger and native can learn. Thus bravery on the stranger's part. Generosity of mind on the native's can only be hoped for. Not an undertaking for the faint of heart.

I also spoke earlier of the unjustly maligned ‘lone scholar’, in the shadow of that other transcendental good, collaboration. Much of the writing on interdisciplinary research is concerned with its collaborative form, the most helpful emphasizing the non-trivial problems of getting disciplinary experts to work productively together. Myra Strober's Interdisciplinary Conversations is an example (Strober 2010). These problems can be more than offset by the rewards of vigorously stubborn othermindedness. But for collaboration across disciplines to work the locus of interdisciplinary thinking, however shared, must be also already in individual minds. The conversation without needs the conversation within. The pioneering lone scholar is in this regard essential to the collaborator's project, trained by engagement not merely with contemporaries but, at least in the historical disciplines, with colleagues of other times and places. ISR continues to welcome writings based on collaborative work or composed collaboratively, but its focus is on their interdisciplinary character.

All the above helps to explain why in practical terms finding submissions worthy of ISR’s mandate is not easy. For a long time the journal has been underwhelmed by unsolicited manuscripts which pass even the first tests of quality. Many who send them have clearly paid no attention whatever to ISR’s advertised purpose. It is as if the title of the journal were Anything Goes. That ignorance combines with the lamentable fact that interdisciplinary research falls between the rigid categories set out by the various research assessment exercises and performance reviews to which academics are subjected. Evidence of the deleterious effects of disciplinary blinders comes, for example, from senior colleagues who express great joy in finding a journal that will tolerate genuinely interdisciplinary work.

Like my predecessor, my response as Editor has been to cultivate themed issues derived sometimes from conferences but most often proposed by colleagues who work devotedly to solicit relevant articles. That these colleagues, including some Editorial Board members, have done so eagerly and so well is testimony to the continuing vitality of the journal. The double issue, History and Human Nature (Inwood and McCarty 2010), centred on the work of Geoffrey Lloyd, was the first of its kind and a great success. ISR is greatly in debt not only to Lloyd and the other contributors but also to former Editorial Board member Brad Inwood, whose idea this issue was. Thus inspired other such issues are in the planning, for example one on the wide-ranging work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold (Aberdeen), for 2018, another on the work of the mathematical geographer and urban modeller Sir Alan Wilson (University College London), for 2019. Next in 2016 will be a double issue on the still ongoing Two Cultures debate, and in 2017 three issues on the sciences and the arts.

Finally let me ask: is it wise, after all, thus to venture into foreign disciplinary territory without any promise of professional reward? Were ISR to look to the ancient tradition of wisdom literature for guidance, it would find a deep and discouraging conservatism, offering advice, especially to the young, about how to get on in life successfully if not just to survive. For example, Aesop's ‘The Dog and the Shadow’:

It happened that a Dog had got a piece of meat and was carrying it home in his mouth to eat it in peace. Now on his way home he had to cross a plank lying across a running brook. As he crossed, he looked down and saw his own shadow reflected in the water beneath. Thinking it was another dog with another piece of meat, he made up his mind to have that also. So he made a snap at the shadow in the water, but as he opened his mouth the piece of meat fell out, dropped into the water, and was never seen again.

Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.

And so the moral: follow the beaten path, never stray into the open fields of knowledge nor wander in the archipelago of disciplines. Or (in contemporary institutional language) look to impact!

Perhaps, alas, the untenured and probationary must be thus wise, but Interdisciplinary Science Reviews starts its 41st year still rebelliously tending the open fields for the adventurous.

Notes

1 Howard Cattermole, private e-mail, 30/12/15.