Here is conceptual play: Do the disciplines, taken together, cover all there is to see? If they do, then interdisciplinary scholarship and research cannot be done outside the disciplines, but instead must be done as visits to more than one discipline. But if the disciplines do not cover all there is to see, then perhaps there is room for new disciplines. However, a new discipline wouldn't be an "interdiscipline" would it?

More conceptual play: A discipline is a systematized body of knowledge and practice grounded on a particular view of the world. As such, at best a discipline offers a partial view of the world. But would anyone say that, taken together and magically merged, the views of all the disciplines would be of the whole world? Could interdisciplinary scholarship and research be mix-and-match among the disciplines in search of a better or more complete view of the world? Can the varied conceptual and methodical cores of the disciplines be brought together without making a big mess?

And more: If interdisciplinary scholarship and research definitionally cannot be done as a discipline, then is there anything cumulative about the findings of interdisciplinary scholarship and research? If a prolonged project of interdisciplinary scholarship and/or research were to prove to be a systematized body of knowledge and practice grounded on a particular view of the world, would it then be a discipline, and so a failed interdisciplinary project? Must scholarship and research, in order to be termed interdisciplinary, be unsystematized as knowledge and as practice? Must interdisciplinary scholarship and research be a mess? Must the interdisciplinary scholar or researcher be undisciplined?

So how can the advocates believe interdisciplinary scholarship and research to be Goods?

* * * * *

The foregoing is intended to make clear a conceptual snarl inherent in the term "interdisciplinary". If interdisciplinary scholarship and research are Goods, then those who say they are must find a way of showing how they are.

Let us presume that the advocates of interdisciplinary scholarship and research are advocates because they find a fault in all disciplinary scholarship and research. Those I have read who are squared off against the disciplines participate in the common error of seeing the whole world through an academic frame of reference. So positioned, might they be unable to see, to conceive of, to comprehend, an entire realm of alternatives to discipline-based, discipline-bound, scholarship and research?

A non-academic view of the matter shows at a glance that both "Interdisciplinarity" and "discipline" are specialized terms, i.e., academic terms of reference. The present essay has been thus far conducted under an academic view of the world, the world academically understood, and (which is not the same thing) academically construed. I have tried to demonstrate that this view can turn efforts to escape the tyranny and/or the dead hands of the disciplines back on themselves. Can we get a better view of our situation by walking out of the academic frame of reference and looking at the academy from the street? We might also do our best thinking from that outside and unspecialized perspective.

Philosopher J. L. Austin¹ noted members of society do not go around constructing statements out of words (in the philosopher's sense of 'statement', e.g., a proposition). Instead, members of society -- we -- do things with words. An example he gave is the 'performative.' For instance, a judge or minister can perform a marriage by pronouncing two persons married.

You and I are sure we know what 'I pronounce you man and wife' means. But that does not mean you or I or a judge or minister authorized to do so, can go around pronouncing any two people married whenever and wherever we want to. Austin noticed that, for a performative to work, 'felicitous' conditions must be present and met.

We do not need to know all of Austin's felicitous conditions in order to guess what one of them must be. At minimum, in order to perform an actual marriage (for example), the judge or minister and the two persons involved must understand what 'I pronounce you man and wife' means. But not just what it means-in-general. Austin wants to show that what is specifically required in any instance and on any occasion for those involved is shared clarity among the parties involved on what 'I pronounce you man and wife' means in particular for just these parties here-and-now. Without such clarity, Austin notes, "something goes wrong and the act [e.g.,] marrying [...], is therefore at least to some extent a failure [...]."²

It is in this specific sense that we can find ourselves unclear as to how, or whether, to pronounce a scholar or researcher, or a piece of scholarship or research, to be interdisciplinary. Of what does the condition or state of 'interdisciplinarity', or the characteristic of interdisciplinarity, consist?

Going beyond Austin, we note how knowing what interdisciplinarity looks like would be the same thing as knowing how to act in ways worthy of being pronounced to be in the state of interdisciplinarity - and our work, as well. In social life, language-use and practical conduct are tightly interwoven.³

I can have my own understanding of something, my own definition. But this can cause trouble. For example, parents might learn that it is insufficient to allow their children to operate from purely private understandings of when bedtime occurs or when homework is to be done. As my wife and I discovered, we and our son needed shared, public definitions of bedtime and study periods.

To talk about kids and bedtime and homework in this context is to talk about more than individuals who must subscribe to a common definition, and so achieve a common understanding. It's first to recognize that parents and their children are particular sorts of persons standing in particular relationship to one another, e.g., as parents and children. And parents-and-their-children are also families. So, for particular purposes and on particular occasions, members of a social institution like a family can require shared understanding among its members in the form of some functional definitions, just in order to function, just to get the institution's work done.

So it is for 'interdisciplinarity' within the academy. Academic institutions are social institutions which, if they prescribe and practice interdisciplinary work, need an internally shared understanding of interdisciplinarity. Of course, when push comes to shove not a few discover they do not.

Although I teach part time, I have never been a practicing academic. I have done other things for a living. When I thought about academics or the academy at all, I did not give interdisciplinary scholarship or scholars, research or researchers, any thought whatever. However, as an uncredentialed amateur ethnomethodologist and conversation analyst, I gave time and attention to figuring out what were the characteristics of the scholars and researchers whose work I admired. I saw, not disciplines, not interdisciplinarity, but persons. The qualities of a person travel with her or him, even across disciplinary boundaries. I have most confidence in interdisciplinarity understood as conduct.

Interdisciplinarity: In intellectual conduct, coherent, rigorous and skeptical enquiry⁴ without necessary regard to the assumptions or procedures of, or claims to domain or phenomena by, any discipline.⁵

Consider: These would appear to be admirable attributes of any scholar or researcher. Taken together, these attributes appear to be a Good. The definition does not preclude work in a discipline and it also positively sanctions work outside any discipline.

The definition demystifies interdisciplinary work and also affords a means by which to decide among workers and work who and which are and are not in the state or condition of, and who or what has or lacks the character of interdisciplinarity. (Whew!) It also points to the existence of relative measures of interdisciplinarity. It does not rule-out whatever the disciplines might have to offer the interdisciplinary worker. It does not rule out the concepts or worth or approaches or technologies or rules of procedures or accumulated knowledge of the disciplines. It provides, without prejudice, the worker with just what is required to examine and access the disciplines.

Working within a discipline has advantages. The interdisciplinary worker has no clear aids to conceptualization, no ready set of commonly agreed important issues and questions, no agreed methods. It is per force up to the interdisciplinary worker alone to decide these matters. However, in common with the worker in a discipline, she or he is engaged in a modality of intellectual enquiry which provides constraints. One's conduct of enquiries is constrained by an unremitting commitment to coherence, rigor, and (intellectual) skepticism. This commonality affords mutual inspection, across disciplines, of one another's work.

Viewed as a shared endeavor, interdisciplinary work is unsystematized. The interdisciplinary worker is never freed of the questions of where and how to look, what to consult, how to work, what counts and what does not count. How to be systematic in any given project is a standing issue.

I admit these presumed disadvantages lead me to do interdisciplinary work. I see how, within a discipline, the matter of approach to phenomena and the work can easily get treated as settled. However, I am fascinated by the matter of approach. Interdisciplinary work guarantees me that I will always confront the problem of approach as a foundational matter. Put another way, interdisciplinary enquiry can be seen to make a topic of inquiry.

Without a priori commitment to any discipline, one may find that the interdisciplinary approach affords a view of the world-as-it-is before it gets rendered amenable for analysis under the particular conceptual view of a discipline. The big wide world in which we really live is a messy place, no respecter of the disciplines. Recognizing this, many within the human and physical and theoretical sciences spend a great deal of time and energy sorting and organizing worldly phenomena and rendering them amenable to methodical study under the assumptive view of a discipline. For the discipline-bound researcher, the possibility exists that the moment she or he begins work, willy-nilly, worldly phenomena have already been selected and altered by the time they enter his or her discipline's analysis, and so will appear only in ways consistent with that discipline's assumptions.

I now speak only for myself.

We do not experience our lives in these specialized ways, and we know it. However, the disciplines (as though they could act alone) do not know anything. They are accumulations of written-down knowledge and sets of practices, all under particular and stable versions of the world.

It would be hell itself were we to discover we were without legitimate means by which to pursue our own questions which arise from our everyday lives in the everyday world without having first to wring the life and recognizability out of our questions by running them through the conceptual apparatus of a discipline. One could want to keep the worldly sense of a worldly question, and so seek locally appropriate rigorous and methodical ways of addressing the question so that the answers make good worldly sense. The tension that arises concerns what coherence and rigor and skeptical enquiry can mean here-and-now; how can they enter and inhabit and direct the work now to be done in the world of everyday life.

2. Austin 1975, p. 14.

3. Vid. Coulter, J. (1991). Logic: Ethnomethodology and the Logic of Language, p. 27. In G. Button (Ed.) Ethnomethodology and the human sciences (pp. 20-50). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

4. Skeptical enquiry proceeds under the policy that any assertion or finding must be of a sort which can be tested and (which is not always the same thing) under the policy that one always submit one's own work, in that form, to that test. The policy of skeptical inquiry is sometimes confused with plain old skepticism perhaps because, under this policy, claims, assertions, reports of findings, arguments, which do not lend themselves to testing (e.g., verification and replication) are typically treated as unworthy of serious consideration.

5. I am sure it is no accident that I have a lifelong preference for persons who think independently, carefully, and critically, who do not take anything on authority, who take care to stay informed, and do not respect intellectual boundaries.