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In this article, I propose that at the juncture of disciplines, the mind is involved in at least 3 cognitive activities: overcoming internal monologism or monodisciplinarity, attaining provisional integration, and questioning the integration as necessarily partial. This claim is supported by interview data I collected primarily from faculty involved in the development and teaching of interdisciplinary courses in programs including the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, Swarthmore College's Interpretation Theory, and the NEXA Program at San Francisco State University. I suggest that interdisciplinary thinking is fundamentally similar to dialogical exchanges occurring in language and in collaborative activities in which epistemological positions are bartered. Bakhtin's (1981) theory of dialogic understanding and subsequent linguistic theories of conceptual metaphor and blending serve as a constructive theoretical framework for the understanding of interdisciplinary cognition. Viewing disciplines broadly as languages, epistemologies, and collaborative practices helps uncover some underlying cognitive mechanisms that deserve further investigation.Are there educational institutions left in this country that do not engage in interdisciplinary work? Is the spread of interdisciplinary programs just a fad or a reflection of a changing pattern of knowledge production? If ubiquity of interdisciplinary learning and teaching is indicative of an important intellectual shift, what does it represent cognitively? What kind of cognitive process is involved in interdisciplinary work? Is it something unique and sui generis, or does interdisciplinary thought follow some basic cognitive pathways involved in other intellectual activities? These questions served as a staring point for this investigation.When one thinks of interdisciplinary insight, one typically thinks of it as an instantaneous flash of imagination that intuitively and inseparably blends ideas and creates a striking new synthesis. However, this image of different perspectives

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