Wide and Narrow Interdisciplinarity.

Abstract

Much of the current conversation in interdisciplinary studies fo cuses on the concept of integration. But with rare exception the literature tends to gloss over a crucial distinction. Where the dis tinction is broached, it is done so implicitly rather than explicitly. What I maintain is that a need exists to distinguish between nar row and wide interdisciplinarity/integration. The distinction I have in mind trades on the fact that there is a very different set of categorial presuppositions operative in the sciences than in the humanities. In the process of focusing on this difference, I also wish to suggest some reasons why it is a distinction often missed, or at least not explicitly addressed. In the first section of this essay, I set the theoretical problem with which I am concerned and begin a brief of the overall argu ment that will unfold. Next I show how this problem arises within interdisciplinary studies when insufficient attention is given to the metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions of the de veloping body of interdisciplinary theory. It is argued that the conceptual framework of scientific naturalism, with its limiting categorial presuppositions, is too minimal to allow for the wide integration of the disciplines. The argument briefed in the first two sections is expanded in the third section, where a humanistic metaphysics is sketched. It is concluded that this humanistic meta physics allows us to make coherent sense of the wide integration of the disciplines so that we can profitably attack the problems of both the physical and the social slums.

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