session 2

The session began with a short recap of the 3 debates that came up in session 1 – namely the deployment of the metaphor of production for knowledge and their subsequent implications in the activity of the social sciences and philosophy, the debate between the “two cultures” of natural and social sciences and their legacy in colonial education, and the apparent choice between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity as an approach to problem-solving.

Session 2 continued the theme of a certain ‘loss’ of the bold possibilities in knowledge production in the separation between natural and social sciences and the ascription of explanation to one side and methodology to the other. The argument made also rested on a certain separation of knowledge and disciplinary knowledge, that streamlines, narrows down, segments. Prof. Rajan Gurukkal began the session with a brief to make a survey of the segmentation of knowledge as a corpus into specific disciplines. Interdisciplinarity can come only later, it is feasible only at a certain stage of knowledge production; it is not a place to begin from. This also means that you cannot really make a choice between the two – disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity as a preferred approach to problem-solving. The researcher, averred Prof. Gurukkal, will have to undergo the anchoring, the rigor, as also the suffocation of disciplinarity before anything like interdisciplinarity can come up. We could therefore look at the somewhat ‘spontaneous’ process where this takes place in the history of disciplines. In history we may see the augmentation of knowledge as philosophy and its segmentation as disciplines. Knowledge-production not segmented into areas may be seen as a more or less neuro-biological process. At some point, however, self-reflexivity sets in, so that the researcher is able to perceive herself as engaged in the production of knowledge. The history of knowledge production therefore is to be understood as the history of human biology as well as human society. We start from an already late point, where disciplines are already heading toward their constitution. Augmentation of knowledge has already taken place, called philosophy. We could, for example, go back to Hellenic, or Chinese or Indian civilization. In Greece, philosophy designated knowledge as generated around objects in nature and life, consisting of theology and metaphysics, and was broadly, in the classical Hellenic world, classified into natural and moral philosophy. In order to manage the corpus of knowledge and make it amenable to retrieval, classification began. At some point, theology, metaphysics, eschatology, were all treated as constituents of philosophy. At some point, more defined areas were ordained as disciplines. Discipline is knowledge disciplined with specified boundaries, as part of a determinate pattern of organization and classification of human thought around particular phenomena in nature or culture. This is a conscious effort. Knowledge is consciously constituted [and here we might recall the discussion around production of knowledge raised in session 1]. The structure is owed to a system of organization of human thought, that we cannot identify as biological, because subsequently we find other systems of organization of human thought. This might be immanent in the psychic process. This classification is a process of segmentation. Augmentation is natural, what is intellectualized and culturalised is segmented. This can go on to the formation of sub-disciplines too. Prof. Gurukkal went on to look at the birth of disciplines which, he said, could be understood in the context of the constitution of science based on Newtonian physics. This was a domain as understood separate from theology, metaphysics, and philosophy. This was the 17th century. Newton was the first to define science in a distinct manner. Science in European languages only meant knowledge; but Newton gave a contingent meaning to it. He made a distinction between knowable and non-knowable. He distinguished knowledge relating to fundamental laws or principles as ultimate knowledge. This ‘how’ is what he talked about rather than the ‘what’, or the ontology of the phenomenon. This changed fundamentally the pattern of human thought and the process of production of knowledge in European. In the East, axiomatic knowledge had become petrified; only extraordinary people could craft knowledge, and it was a separate kind than axiomatic. In Europe, however, knowledge became transparent, impersonal, and open, independent of the knower. This made Newtonian science different. This did not take place in other civilizations. The Acharya-Brahmachari relationship was different, from the scientist-student relationship. The latter was highly transparent, the former a charismatic one. The latter was a dialectical process of intellectual exchange, the former did not claim new knowledge, but in the process of reinterpretation new knowledge was sometimes produced. Europe was somehow able to overcome this culturally contingent factor owing to their mode of production of knowledge – formalized institutionalized laboratory settings, instrumentalisation … each scientist becoming a technologist, and technology gradually becoming an autonomous domain …

Every aspect of knowledge of human life found itself placed in the Newtonian framework. Comte’s impulse to talk about a science of society is a case in point. Comte anticipated a period where social knowledge would become very close to physics. Later scientists themselves began withdrawing from the possibility of complete predictability.

The very idea of the constitution of a discipline was however mooted by physics. Each area then distinguished itself as specialized knowledge around an object. So each area got constituted as a discipline. In the age that followed the Newtonian ethos, the 18th century, is called the Age of Enlightenment, methodological strategies were sought to critically revisit established truths. Several versions of the truth were sought. The challenge was to have a version intimate to Absolute truth. It was suggested that truth was at a distance, and social truth, for instance, was caused by it, while not being identical with it. The process of negotiating to arrive at this, was called methodology. Scientists were only concerned with manageable truth, so were not obsessed with methodology. This methodological obsession was one of the causes for distinct separation of disciplines. The broad separation between natural and social sciences, then, was becoming clear – the former studying natural reality, objectively, and the other – relying on imagination, creativity, talking about existence, sometimes transcendence. On the one hand, the social sciences might look like the natural sciences in their attempt to be objective, sometimes not. The lines were sometimes parallel, often diverging. Prof. Gurukkal went on to discuss some of the pre-texts for the coming of sociology and anthropology by way of example – like the work of Montesquieu or Miller, Malthus or Adam Smith – work which did not worry about the distance with physics in this kind of theorising. The distinction between common-sensical knowledge and specialized knowledge was however kept alive. With the coming of Comte and Positivism, distinctions between disciplines became more rigorous. This was the time of a methodological struggle for inclusion in science among these fields of knowledge as well as a struggle for methodological exclusivity … explains the proliferation of disciplines. This ‘positivist’ production of social knowledge not only made it more shallow, but increased the distance from physics. The response was – more methodology, more exclusive methodology. So each discipline became a compendium of knowledge based on methodologically sustained theoretical explanation. This was true of the state of social sciences during the Enlightenment, but they identified themselves only as philosophy during this time. In the early debates prior to discipline formation, there was no attempt to equate the knowledge produced to physics. But later, the insistence on application of scientific methodology to non-science disciplines gave rise to the positivist mode of applying Newtonian principles to Cartesian reason, emphasizing the particular rather than the general, the observable rather than the principle, and experience rather than rational speculation, pushing everything down to knowledge as empirically given. There was no longer a role for intuition for which there had been a place in Newtonian science. Science, which occupied the space between empirical givens and pure reason can be communicated through mathematics. Science cannot be reduced to the empirically given, but positivist misunderstandings of this gave rise to the continued shallowness of knowledge produced during that time. Prof. Gurukkal went on to make a fairly polemical statement about a fraternal relationship between post-structuralism and positivism in this light, where micro-theory is valorized, positions are not taken, and the search for truth sought to be undermined. In the distinction between social sciences and natural sciences, however, and especially in his indictment of micro-theory as the ‘only’ thing to do, Prof. Gurukkal made an insightful observation into the descriptive nature of micro-theory that fails to provide either tools or material for analysis. He therefore made a clear distinction between narrative social science and nomothetic or theoretical social science, where one is knowledge representation as a shadow of the original, and the latter is knowledge production through a cognitive encounter, asking for a return to the latter.

The next part of the session went on to look at the structure of disciplines within which knowledge is produced. When several disciplines are put together around the same object, knowledge diverges. This is what we experience in the context of discipline learning, so that there is no meaningful dialogue between disciplines owing to the insularity of knowledge generated. Multi-disciplinary understandings, therefore, are the same as disciplinary; it is just a putting together. What then is interdisciplinary knowledge? It consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one. It should be distinguished from multi-disciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity attracts a paradigm shift, whereas multi-disciplinarity goes very well with the idea of disciplinary knowledge. Interdisciplinarity does not quarrel with established disciplines; rather, it starts from the object of knowledge, analysis of the object helps convergence of the knowledge available in various disciplines for analytical comprehension. The example of water was dwelt upon in some detail to make this point – its ontology, its chemical representation, its stated as a contested natural resource rather than a natural object, its importance as an issue. It is important to approach an object not sanctioned by any of the disciplines, and then proceed with the art or science of knowing … so from divergence to convergence is the process of interdisciplinary study.

Prof. Gurukkal would place interdisciplinarity, understood this way, above disciplinarity. Intra-disciplinarity is a step ahead of disciplinarity as possible within the discipline. Trans-disciplinarity is the step toward interdisciplinarity. One is narrowing, the other widening, one divergent the other convergent, one atomistic the other holistic, one is centering, the other decentering, one is excluding, the other inclusive. Through interdisciplinarity one is able to influence the progress of one’s own discipline. An epistemological critique of one’s own discipline then becomes possible. In this process, “disciplinary” methodology or theory will face collapse. Relevant knowledge is thus produced.

Questions raised in discussion included rumination on the historical reasons why the social sciences seemed to carry the burden of descriptive or narrative work more than theory as seemed to have been suggested; whether interdisciplinarity is ‘natural’ to human beings and what would be ways to exercise it in teaching; whether there were already disciplines that started out as interdisciplinary; whether the work of interdisciplinarity included work that needed to be ‘done’ rather than thought upon; clarifications on why post-structuralism might be suggested as the ‘elder brother’ of positivism.

A note here. It might be useful to recall that the descriptive pressure in many social science disciplines today at the cost of the analytic, has to do with the ‘withdrawal’ that was suggested in the first session – the ‘moral’ pressure, as it were, to not represent, because representation would be ex-officio violent, exclusive. This has ended in a paralysis of understanding, and it is this paralysis, this loss of the boldness of knowledge-making, that was being pointed to, rather than a comfortable two cultures divide where one is inherently superior to the other. As mentioned in the last session, a deeply reflexive account. At any rate, it is interesting to see this movement in the social sciences – as a step away from apologia, as a possible return to boldness.

In conclusion, it might be suggested that one of the learnings from this session might be not to confuse criticism with critique, and to steer clear of that impulse in disciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, as understood here, might perhaps be the starting impulse that makes this clarity possible. This suggestion is of course open to debate.