ken,

i know you like dictionary definitions, but most of them are old and not
necessarily reflecting the use of terms. what your dictionary describes as
"pertaining to two or more disciplines or branches of learning" or "
benefiting from two or more disciplines" sound to me like multi-disciplinary
= many disciplines participate. you characterize my use of
inter-disciplinary = between what disciplines normally address as "a barren
no-man's-land where nothing happens." well, that is your metaphor and no
doubt describes your experiences, not mine.

much of my life i have worked in this no man's land and found it enormously
open, unconstrained, and providing a creative space that most other
disciplines do not offer. as you probably know, i am also a cybernetician
and cybernetics was from its beginning without an institutional home, which
has enabled it to make the most astonishing proposals from putting purpose
into a feedback loop, favoring non-authoritarian forms of organization
(self-organization), developing a human (observer) centered epistemology,
radical constructivism, for example and more. this was precisely because it
was relatively free. perhaps non-disciplinary would be a better term, and i
stand to my previous warning that inter-disciplinary means working between
disciplines.

another example, according to the dictionary you consulted, you identify
disciplines as "academic, scientific, or artistic disciplines." no problem
with that, but it does not shed light on the fact that disciplines have
something to do with how a discourse community disciplines its members,
imposes norms, celebrates exemplary practices, certifies its members and
withdraws their licenses when they do not conform. in academia, disciplines
compete for students, resources, funding. it is not a logical distinction,
not a wetland. no problem with your preferring this metaphor but you have
to convince others to abandon their fields and their turf wars, which are
quite real, and join the pipe dream of your wetland

there is nothing wrong with borrowing concepts from discourses other than
one's own, provided you do not thereby abandon your professional mission.
for example, if you borrow the concept of design that is common in
marketing, namely that design is a way of adding value to a product and part
of a marketing strategy, then you allow design discourse to be colonized,
taken over, and subsumed by marketing conceptions of it. to me, this would
be a sell-out. to me, design is more than sales and designers have to
import concepts that subvert design.

klaus


ken said:

The definition of interdisciplinarity that you propose -- "territory between
established disciplines" -- is based on a conception of knowledge quite
foreign to those who pursue interdisciplinary work.

Most of us use the term as the Oxford English Dictionary does: "Of or
pertaining to two or more disciplines or branches of learning; contributing
to or benefiting from two or more disciplines." "Add:
Hence interdisciplinarity n., the quality, fact, or condition of being
interdisciplinary." Merriam-Webster's usage exemplars make the same point
while including artistic practices in the term
"discipline": "involving two or more academic, scientific, or artistic
disciplines."

Descriptive lexicography states means ("definitions") in terms of the way
people actually use the word in daily life and in published exemplars. For a
scholar who takes a strong stand on the power of language as the way we
construct our world, you do not seem to accept the way that
interdisciplinary scholars conceive and language the world. It is quite
different to the way that you describe it. The concept of
interdisciplinarity based on partitioned knowledge and the spaces between
partitions suggests a barren no-man's-land where nothing happens.

The metaphor I prefer is a wetlands, a tidal zone where rich life bubbles up
and interacts between different kinds of knowledge ecologies. Any taxonomy
of fruitful disciplines is generally temporary -- mathematics as it was in
Leibniz's day is not the mathematics of Hilbert's time nor yet mathematics
as we use it today.
The fields, focal points, purposes and linkages to applied mathematics are
each different, and out understanding of the philosophy underlying
mathematics is also different -- with a much greater recognition of roles
that social construction and metaphor play in mathematical thinking. Shaping
a taxonomy of the discipline or disciplines of mathematics would give you a
different picture in each era. That's how it is with all disciplines.