A Mental Model for Academic Fields (Part 1)
The pipeline of society and its scientific cross-sections
This is Part 1 of a 2, maybe 3 part series…
There’s this guy that basically nobody cares about outside of academia but a lot of people within academia talk about him a lot. His name is Thomas Kuhn, and in 1962 he wrote this book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The basic insight of the book is that the scientific process is not necessarily linear, but comes in two sorts of modes: evolutionary and revolutionary.
You know like, there’s a ton of evolutionary years of looking at the stars and then BANG! the Copernican Revolution, tons of years of guys in bird masks evolving the best way to bleed people with leeches, and then BANG! the germ theory of disease, antibiotics, modern medicine. If you’ve heard the term “paradigm shifts” Kuhn is where that term comes from. The real meat of Kuhn’s stuff though was his take on the fact that these paradigm shifts are sort of sociological in nature as opposed to purely rational and logical.
But so, last semester I was in a Doctoral Seminar and we were talking about disciplines and how knowledge changes and grows over time and the professor offered this sorta puzzle metaphor.
He said that you know, the blue pieces are this sort of evolutionary change in knowledge—the blue is the sort of knowledge-making where you’re testing other people’s ideas but maybe changing one thing or using a theory in a different context. This is a lot of what goes on within the academy.
Then there’s the yellow where you’re like, building bridges between islands, seeing connections that need to be made within your field. To do this yellow sort of knowledge-making in your field you need to be a bit more grounded in what’s out there—in terms of data, methods, or theory—and just know the landscape a little better to connect other people’s ideas.
Then there are the red pieces, lonely travelers, often banished and told they are crazy out there developing their own ideas but sometimes in a moment of glory become the new center for the blue pieces. These red pieces if they develop enough pull can shift the center of gravity of a field of study and precipitate a “paradigm shift” within a field. Quickly:
A paradigm is made up of several theoretical assumptions, and rules/laws, and techniques for their application that members of a particular community adopt. A “mature science” is governed by a single paradigm—which sets the standard for legitimate work within the science it governs. The paradigm coordinates the puzzle-solving activity of the group.
Switching paradigms requires the equivalent of a “religious conversion” because people working in rival paradigms is the equivalent of working in different worlds.
Melodramatic, but sure, true. Fields evolve and then BANG there’s a redshift. But there’s sort of another story too here in that, how do the different fields, planes, or puzzles relate to one another?
Enter: The pipeline of society.
I’m down to argue in the comment section below over this is an accurate portrayal of all of what is going on here with whatever we’re doing as humans on this planet, but it feels basically true. There we each are, people, just going about our day seeking values (wellbeing, respect, power, etc.) through institutions (corporations, governments, religions, identities, etc.) that ultimately use natural resources (water, oil, slaves, etc.). So yeah, this is basically sorta what we’re doing all the time here on this planet. But as we go about piping natural resources through institutions that convert them to various values for people we also need to continue to know about what the fuck is going on. This is where the two-dimensional academic fields, disciplines, or PUZZLES come in.
Each puzzle or field of knowledge-making can be thought of as arrayed perpendicularly and cross-sectionally to the pipe of society. Again, each field is going through its own evolutionary and revolutionary processes, and throughout the pipe of society, there are sort of an infinite number of academic fields or cross-sections. Each field or puzzle of knowing is always trying to keep up with the fast-paced reality of the deluge of the pipe.
Most of the things that happen with institutions are not and will never be known by sociology. Almost everything happening out there in the web of life will never be known to ecology. But alas, we must continue to know somethings, right? How else should we feel like we’re in control?
But each field tries to keep up, tries to generate knowledge that’s useful to someone. There are evolutions, revolutions, and bridge-building, and many people spend their lives as adventurers of a single field and can do so because academic disciplines are institutions themselves, communities that use natural resources to provide values like respect and enlightenment to their members and, in an ideal world, the public.
Typically as the diameter of any given point along the pipe of society swells, so does the science, the puzzle chasing the cross-section as it expands. The fattest part of the pipe also typically has the most money to know more about themselves, expand their diameters even wider. More natural resources per second piped through, thus more value for people.
Our knowledge of what’s going on with all this life here will never be complete. And I mean, it’s probably generous to say that our knowledge is partial. I think the more accurate thing to say is that we know almost nothing. It’s a miracle we feel like we know anything at all, which I think that’s a better place to start in building bridges across disciplines than to think that the particular puzzle you’re building can solve the world’s problems. The question then is what do we do about this? How should we stitch these fields of knowledge together, how to integrate across the fields toward a common good. This is the grander mystery.
Part 2 will be sort of about:
What exists in the space between the fields? Where is philosophy here? And how do problems and solutions of various types map onto this model?