The only interdisciplinary conversations worth having

(This is a niche post of interest to a relatively narrow community of scholars. I’ll be back soon with something more normal.)

---

1.

Quite early in my career, when I was just out of graduate school, I co-organized (with my friend Jerry Samet) the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP) conference. One of our invited keynote speakers was Steven Pinker, and I asked the philosopher Jerry Fodor to introduce him.

Fodor gave a witty and generous introduction. He discussed how Pinker’s work spanned multiple disciplines and praised its theoretical depth and empirical ingenuity. But Fodor noted that Pinker was an exception. Most interdisciplinary research, he said, was a waste of time. It didn’t amount to anything.

This surprised me. How could Fodor be so disparaging? After all, his own work was deeply interdisciplinary. He was married to Janet Dean Fodor, a linguist who studied the psychology of sentence understanding, and they often collaborated. He did experimental research with psychologists who studied conceptual structure and language development, such as Lila Gleitman. In 1974, he co-authored a textbook called “The Psychology of Language.” In 1983, he wrote "Modularity of Mind," a short and brilliant book that primarily addressed the psychology of perception. So why in the world was he crapping on interdisciplinary research?

At some point in his introduction, he said this.

The only interdisciplinary conversations worth having are those that go on inside a single head.

At the time, I had no idea what he was talking about. But I’ve been thinking about it on and off for the last thirty years, and I think I finally get what Fodor meant by this sentence, and I think he’s right.

2.

Fodor’s remarks bothered me because, at the time, I saw myself as an interdisciplinary kind of scholar. I took it personally. I was an undergraduate in Psychology, but my PhD was in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT—an unusual department where the faculty was made up of scholars from many different fields. (This faculty included, when I started the program, Jerry Fodor.)

I still see myself as interdisciplinary. I’ve had joint appointments in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Law; I’ve served as president of SPP (the conference where Fodor spoke); I edit a journal that focuses on interdisciplinary work, Behavioral and Brain Sciences; and I regularly collaborate with scholars from outside psychology, particularly philosophers.

Having this sort of career means that I’ve attended many events designed to spark and encourage interdisciplinary collaborations. There are a lot of these—university administrators and grant foundations love this sort of thing, and the word “interdisciplinary” looks great on a grant application.

For instance, I spent a few years regularly traveling to Brooklyn for a Templeton-funded project, where a cross-disciplinary group (comprising psychologists, sociologists, theologians, and others) determined how to allocate many millions of dollars to scholars researching prayer. I’ve attended conferences that brought together computer scientists and developmental psychologists, cognitive scientists and visual artists, and experimental psychologists and philosophers interested in narrative. If you’re an academic, you know the sort of X-meets-Y conference I’m talking about. As you read this, there is a meeting taking place in some downtown Marriott where historians of rap are engaging in a panel discussion with marine biologists.

Sometimes these are fun. In my Templeton gig, I had a great time partying with the sociologists.

Sometimes they are less fun. I once attended an event where developmental psychologists were supposed to team up with anthropologists to do research together, and the anthropologists were cold and defensive; they felt that the psychologists didn’t understand or respect their work. (Reader, they were right.)

What they rarely are is useful. The whole is less than the sum of the parts. Have you heard the phrase “parallel play”? Here’s a definition scooped from the web.

Parallel play is a type of play where children play in close proximity to each other, but without direct interaction or influence on each other's activities. It's a common stage in early childhood development, often seen in toddlers, where they engage in their own activities while sharing the same space.

That’s my experience at most of these conferences.

I wouldn’t say that such efforts to bridge disciplines are never successful. I’m sure that sometimes valuable research emerges. Perhaps, this is true as well for fortuitous research collaborations. Maybe a physicist has a casual conversation with a personality psychologist and, boom, it’s magic—just like in the classic TV commercial from the 1980s.

But these are exceptions. Many considerations make this sort of interdisciplinary magic unlikely. People from different disciplines are interested in different problems; they use different methods; they draw upon different, often incommensurable, theoretical frameworks. It’s like romantic relationships. Sure, there are some happy cases of opposites attracting, and this is the stuff of great romantic comedies. In the real world, though, most successful couples share similar characteristics in terms of intelligence, interests, political attitudes, and the like. Differences make relationships more challenging.

3.

Interdisciplinary work can be done right.

I’m writing this post after attending the most recent SPP conference at Cornell University. (Here is the program.) It is an explicitly interdisciplinary conference; you can tell by the name: Society for PHILOSOPHY and PSYCHOLOGY. And it’s more interdisciplinary than that; the conference included neuroscientists, computer scientists, linguists, and other fellow travelers.

It’s my favorite conference by far. It’s where I send undergraduates and graduate students; I rave about it to my friends. Some talks are duds, of course, but the average is very good indeed.¹ The level of audience engagement is high. There is a buzz of excited conversation in the hallways and the poster sessions, and, yes, many productive collaborations have come from attending this conference, including a few of my own.

So what’s the difference? The special thing about SPP is that while most people there have homes in traditional disciplines, they tend to come to the conference already engaged and interested in the ideas and methods of other adjacent fields. So a neuroscientist who studies color vision, say, will be conversant with the philosophical literature on the nature of color. A philosopher interested in the ontology of race will have thought deeply about the debates within social psychology regarding the nature and extent of implicit racial bias. And so on. If you’re genuinely interested in a domain, after all, you should be engaged with the work of other smart people who approach the issue—even if they are housed in different parts of the university.

I would think this is obvious, but it isn’t. I know many psychologists who only care about what’s published in psychology journals. This might not be a bad career move if you’re in a community where the journal editors, grant reviewers, and members of tenure committees also only care about what’s published in psychology journals. But:

a) It’s intellectually… disappointing. (I can be harsher, but I’ll stick with that.)

AND

b) If you are that kind of psychologist, putting you in a room with a bunch of philosophers who only care about what’s published in philosophy journals is almost certainly going to be a waste of time. You’ll end up doing parallel play.

A better model for scholarship is what we find at a conference like SPP, where, as Fodor put it, the interdisciplinary conversation is already going on in single heads. With this in place, other scholars from other disciplinary homes aren’t so different from you, and valuable collaboration becomes a lot more likely.

1. You want names? See here for the winners of the Stanton Prize, given by the SPP to a young scholar in philosophy or psychology who has begun making significant contributions to interdisciplinary research. I’d kill to have any of them in my department.