Disciplinarity and the Growth of Knowledge

Abstract

I want to consider how the general characteristics of a discipline might facilitate “social mechanisms for distributing knowledge” that do not depend on uniformity of use, but, in fact, on different uses by different people. Indeed, I want to show that the ways in which a discipline is organized afford the growth of knowledge and do so, in particular, by facilitating an approach to what Thomas Kuhn described as “the essential tension” between, on the one hand, the traditional or customary elements of disciplined enquiry, which are prerequisites for there being a community of enquiry, and, on the other hand, the innovative elements of disciplined enquiry, which are needed on account of the always already inadequate character of our engagement with the objects of enquiry.

Keywords:

• Disciplines
• Knowledge
• Enquiry

Notes

[1] See D’Agostino (2010, esp. chap. 3.1).

[2] Compare my (2010) article, “An analytics of marginality”.

[3] See, e.g. Geertz (1993).

[4] For a key to the parenthetical references associated with these points, see “Reference” section.

[5] Accessed on 3 January 2012 at http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/0/6BB427AB9696C225CA2574180004463E?opendocument.

[6] Philosophy and Studies in Religion are grouped together at two-digit level, with the following four-digit subdivisions, in which Philosophy appears as a separate field of enquiry:• 2201 Applied Ethics• 2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields• 2203 Philosophy• 2204 Religion and Religious Studies• 2299 Other Philosophy and Religious StudiesIf we were interested, for example, in Epistemology, as a recognized branch of philosophic enquiry, we would look at the six-digit level and find it as 220304 Epistemology. As this example shows, six-digit classifications are likely to be of sub-disciplines.

[7] See, e.g. Barrie (2004).

[8] Threshold concepts are those the student must grasp as a precondition of grasping the others in a larger system of knowledge. They “open the door” to the discipline.

[9] Signature pedagogies are those which reproduce in the classroom or laboratory the sorts of activities that professional practitioners engage in—e.g. experiments in physics lab classes.

[10] Whitley (2000, 121).

[11] Op. cit., 121–2.

[12] Op. cit., 123.

[13] Op. cit., 87–8.

[14] Becher (1989, 77–9).

[15] It is possible, though Becher himself does not make this point, that rural disciplines reflect a “style of subjectivity”, as During calls it, that is oriented to, precisely, the cultivation of an individualized subjectivity, as in literary criticism, whereas the urban disciplines reflect a style of subjectivity that is oriented to the standardization of the subjectivity of individual enquirers on some canonical approach using some relatively prescriptive method over some relatively well-defined hierarchy of problems.

[16] Op. cit., 19.

[17] My book Incommensurability and Commensuration: The Common Denominator (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003) attempted that for some of our institutions of commensuration.

[18] I see now, though I do not think I knew this before, that Delaney (1994, 148) used this phrase in his article.

[19] On 3 January 2012, a search on “Plato” in the Philosopher’s Index returned 11,636 “hits” and one on “Wittgenstein” 7820.

[20] See my argument in Naturalizing Epistemology (2010), chap. 2 that Kuhn should be so regarded.

[21] See The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970, 11): “Men whose research is guided by shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i.e. for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition”.

[22] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970, 44 and 23): “[Enquirers] can … agree in their identification of a paradigm without agreeing or, or even attempting to produce a full interpretation or rationalization of it”. “[T]he paradigm is rarely an object for replication. Instead, … it is an object for further articulation and specification under new and more stringent conditions”.

[23] The locus classicus is Polanyi (1966). Kuhn recognized the importance of tacit knowledge. See Kuhn (1970, 51).

[24] The notion of “loose coupling” is potentially very significant in understanding how disciplines function. See Weick (1976).

[25] Kuhn (1970, 185).

[26] Kuhn (1959, 324).

[27] See my (2005) analysis.

[28] Op. cit., 71.

[29] Op. cit., 73.

[30] Op. cit., 78.

[31] D’Agostino (2010, chap. 6.7).

[32] D’Agostino (2010, chap. 6.7).