dear ken

i grant you your definition of interdisciplinary as long as you say it is
yours. i am less concerned with defining the word than with what i
practice. to me it is pointless to argue that the english "inter" does not
only mean "between" and that you prefer the meaning "among" and "together
with." i doubt that many english speakers would interpret "inter" that way,
but this is an empirical question. you can read its latin origin your way
but you run the risk of being misunderstood (which you often are). if you
insist on your meaning, why don't you call it "among-disciplinary" or
"together with-disciplinary" or use the more familiar word
"multi-disciplinary. that i mentioned earlier as fitting your meaning better
than inter....

i didn't attribute any motivation to your use of dictionaries, so i could
not possible be mistaken on why you use it, as you suggest. but what i
object to and we have struggled earlier about the same issue, that is your
absolutist claim that a particular word means such and such, as if this were
cast in stone and because someone wrote it into a dictionary it has to be a
true definition from which nobody should deviate or else be wrong. i wished
you would own your reading and not hide behind an objectivist facade.
language is never that definite - unless some institution insists on it.

as i said in my earlier response, you characterize my use of
inter-disciplinary = between what disciplines normally address as "a barren
no-man's-land where nothing happens." don't you think it would be fair to
say that this is your metaphor fitting your experiences and accepting for me
to say that it just does not fit mine which i exemplified in the case of my
involvement with cybernetics. if you read, the macy proceedings, you may
notice that the participants gave a damn from where their members came from,
but much whether they pursued certain often vague but challenging and
unorthodox ideas about circularity, learning machines, self-reference,
self-organization, even god, golem and design. they could do that precisely
because these ideas had no disciplinary homes, at least not how they treated
them. to escape the meanings that you want to attribute to the word
interdisciplinary, i like to leave you with them and propose a term that
fits my meaning better: "heretic."

since i know you will immediately go to a dictionary to find the "true"
meaning of the word, let me give you mine: "a heretic is willing to make
choices that others (the orthodox, including those committed to particular
disciplines) do not dare to consider.

klaus
 
p.s., i leave the trail of our responses so that there is a reduced chance
that others take you out of context
k

p.s., by the way the cybernetician you cite is norbert wiener, not weiner.
(in german, weinen means crying and he was everything else but a cry-baby,
whether his family originated in vienna, i cannot say)
k

-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken
Friedman
Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2007 2:28 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Interdisciplinary Discourse and Knowledge Ecologies

Dear Klaus,

This is a reply on discourse more than a reply on the subject. Your note
seems a bit grumpy -- and you've explicitly reversed what I wrote by quoting
something out of context and misattributing to me a meaning where I wrote
the exact contrary.

You're mistaken on why I use the dictionary -- I've written on this topic
several times in exactly this kind of debate. The Oxford English Dictionary
and Merriam-Webster's preserve old definitions but continually check current
usage to reflect and exemplify current usage.

Meerriam-Webster's uses a citation file of some 16 million words and
exemplars and a computerized corpus of over 70 million words and exemplars.
The Oxford English Dictionary draws on a massive base of quotations and
usage exemplars -- I can't seem to find the number, but the current edition
of the dictionary USES 2,436,600 exemplars to illustrate words and their
meanings. Over 20% of these words come from the 20th century.

Editors at both dictionaries continually review usage to ensure currency.
The first OED citation for "interdisciplinary" is to 1937.
The latest is 1972. The first OED citation for "interdisciplinarity"
is 1970, the latest 1988. These words have not substantially changed
meanings over the past to years. In fact, even though cultural attitudes
toward interdisciplinary research has shifted several times, the usage
examplars remain quite consistent over time.

You're writing as though lexicographers work on etymology and medieval roots
rather than current meanings.

Etymology does play a role, but you've looked at one meaning of the prefix
among several, and not the relevant one.

The Latin preposition and adverb "inter" means "between, among, amid, in
between, in the midst." As an adjectivial prefix used in English, "inter"
means, "Between or among other things or persons; between the parts of, in
the intervals of, or in the midst of, something; together with; between
times or places, at intervals, here and there." You focusing on the meaning
BETWEEN when the relevant meaning in this case is AMONG and TOGETHER WITH.

Interdisciplinarity doesn't mean that many disciplines participate, though
-- of course, this MAY be the case, and in some cases it is.
It means that one may draw on concepts or practices from two or more
disciplines and arts (i.e., professional practices). Whether you agree with
me or not, I've used the metaphor of a wetlands, a lively place, and I have
not experienced interdisciplinarity as a no man's land -- I didn't even say
that you experienced territory between disciplines as barren, but rather
that your description of the word made it sound so. But then, combining what
you write here with what you wrote to Francois suggests that you, too, are
working in what you call an interdisciplinary way -- working in the
no-man's-land that you praise in your note to me.

Look, it seems to me that we agree on much of the ideological substance in
your note, and we certainly agree that disciplines have turf wars and that
disciplinarians try to enforce local codes of culturally accepted behavior
within their fields.

Where we disagree is on whether the concept of interdisciplinarity can
function by drawing on ideas, concepts and practices from many sources
depending on the needs of the interdisciplinary work, or whether it
necessarily entails suffering the disciplinary controls of the people and
cultures of each discipline on which a project may draw. Now the historical
experience of many interdisciplinary projects is that this does sometimes
happen -- and when it does, things bog down and little growth takes place.

It also happens quite the opposite. And HERE, I'll give you exactly the
example of cybernetics. For all the freedom it allows, and it allows much,
you'd have to agree that cybernetics does not have one institutional home
but many. People work in cybernetics in and from bases in several locations,
usually the university departments that pay their salaries and sponsor their
work ... the discipline is communication in your case, biology or
engineering for many, mathematics for Norbert Weiner, anthropology for
Gregory Bateson, complexity science for many today.

You might know Mary Catherine Bateson's (1972) lovely book, Our Own
Metaphor, describing a conference that Gregory Bateson organized in
1968 bringing experts together from different fields to discuss the world
through a cybernetic perspective. She describes interdisciplinarity at
several points in a warm positive way -- and it seems to me that her
understanding of cybernetics -- based on Gregory Bateson's understanding --
involved an interdisciplinary approach. Now you don't have to believe Mary
Catherine Bateson or even Gregory Bateson, but as the Bateson Professor, I
think it's fair to acknowledge that some people see cybernetics as an
interdisciplinary approach or field.

Norbert Weiner (1973: 2-3) opens Cybernetics by discussing the "boundary
regions of science which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified
investigator." This is close to my metaphor of the wetlands, and Weiner goes
on to describe the opportunities and the problems that confront anyone
involved in this kind of research.

Substantively, I agree with you on the important contributions of
cybernetics that would not have been possible elsewhere or (perhaps) in
specific fields. I certainly recognize the value of your ideas and work in
design and elsewhere from a cybernetic perspective.

But I'm going to disagree with you still on two things. The first is what
the word interdisciplinary means. The second is that [cybernetics] in NOT
interdisciplinary -- it may not be for you, but it seems to me that Bateson
and Weiner might have had a different view, speaking warmly of work with
colleagues from two or more disciplines, and -- in the case of Weiner's
(1973: 3) Cybernetics, even giving specific examples of the positive value
of disciplinary knowledge to work by teams of colleagues from several
disciplines.

This is not a note on interdisciplinary discourse and knowledge ecologies,
but it is relevant nevertheless to examine what words mean. It seems to me
that in refusing to recognize the contribution of people who study the
meaning of words in the context of contemporary, active usage, you risk
building the rigid kinds of academic barriers you warn against.

As for the "pipe dream" of my wetland, I didn't think I needed to persuade
anyone to give up their turf wars to join me. If people want to enjoy their
turf wars and disputes, who am I to say no? I'd rather let them fight with
each other than bother me. If I can avoid them, I prefer to do so.
Admittedly, it is not always possible, but many people do work in a robust,
interdisciplinary way, and they are the ones I like working with.

Nevertheless, I want to suggest that I did not invent the wetlands -- I
joined an ongoing enterprise in the boundary regions of science." I read
Weiner long ago, and I thought that I was joining him and his colleagues,
not as a cybernetician, but as someone willing to understand the world and
our human place in the world with tools from more than one tool kit.

Yours,

Ken

--

Reference

Bateson, Mary Catherine. 1972. Our Own Metaphor. a Personal Account of a
Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Weiner, Norbert. 1973. Cybernetics. Or Communication and Control in the
Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

--

Klaus Krippendorff wrote:

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


Klaus Krippendorff wrote [to Francois-Xavier Nsenga]

--snip--

inter-disciplinary -- working on a problem that lies between disciplines, in
no man's land, so to speak

--snip--