Donald T. Campbell on the institutions of scientific knowledge and the limits to interdisciplinarity

Abstract

Extracts from an important article by the American psychologist, philosopher and social scientist Donald T. Campbell are reproduced here, with an introduction underlining the importance of his argument for today. Campbell identified disciplinary boundaries as enablers of specialization but often barriers to scientific innovation and shared knowledge. But instead of unbounded interdisciplinarity, Campbell argued for focused specialisms that cross disciplinary boundaries. This argument is particularly relevant for the development of institutional research in the future.

How to measure Interdisciplinary Research? A `systemic' design for the model of measurement

“…However, scientific knowledge started to follow disciplinary paths for the sake of producing standardised professional credentials, facilitating the enrolment and social mobility of students and scholars, not for the benefit of novel research. An approach that reproduces too strictly academic partitions does not necessarily exert positive effects on the facilitation of novel research, in fact while professors (experienced teachers, mentors) are Professors-in-a-discipline, research personnel is assigned to highly specific projects with extravagant and not-standard names (Stichweh, 1992;Becher, 1994;Bourke and Butler, 1998;Godin, 1998;Jacobs and Frickel, 2009;Hodgson, 2022).…”

“…Indeed, all studies concerned with the positional role of a body of research depends by the topological maps of scientific knowledge pioneered by authors as Boyack et al (2005); Leydesdorff and Rafols (2009); Porter and Rafols (2009); Börner et al (2012); Carusi and Bianchi (2020), and the notion of disciplinary position as relevant attribute of IDR primarily concerns dimensions like centrality/periphericity or the density of the close neighbourhood. Indeed, evolutionary theories of knowledge postulate the theory that the growth of IDR is primarily driven by a process tha of filling the most evident gaps in the development of scientific knowledge (Campbell, 2017;Hodgson, 2022;Hou et al, 2023). This immaterial process of that contrast hyper-specialised novelty in research with an integration of the whole scientific knowledge (opposed to a highly local integration aimed to present novel ideas) is the dimension of disciplinary Cohesion.…”