A 2009 “dividing wall” of the minds dilemma depiction, artistic sketch by Albanian artist Medi Belortaja (Ѻ), showing that amid the divisional groupings of the humanities (sociology-centric) and the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, astronomy) and natural sciences (evolution-centric), that not everyone is on the “same page” in regards to uniform belief ideas about the human nature, according to which the, in the university and intellectual community, as pointed out by Harold Morowitz (1979) the “splitters (anti-interdisciplinaritists), i.e. those not engaged in integrative thought, are in command and the lumpers (disciplinaritists), i.e. engaged in integrative thought, are in serious disarray, unable to keep up with the output of printouts that are generated in such a variety of ways”. [2] |
“The terms ‘splitters’ and ‘lumpers’ come from taxonomy, where the classifiers were separated into those who liked to create new taxa because of small differences and those who preferred to coalesce categories because of similarities. The concept has found wider applicability as knowledge in all fields expands. Specialists are confined to ever-narrowing domains while generalists survey the immensity of information in an effort, one hopes, to find higher orders of structure. It is clear that in the university and intellectual community ... the splitters are in command and the lumpers are in serious disarray, unable to keep up with the output of printouts that are generated in such a variety of ways. It is saddening to witness the loss of status of those engaged in integrative thought, for one sees in it the fragmentation of scientific and humanistic disciplines.”
A 2015 blog flyer (Ѻ) for a Yale interdisciplinarity major program, e.g. philosophy + chemistry, as shown. |
“Surrounding us on all sides are the physicists, chemists, geologists, and astronomers, with whom we must reckon, for their domains and their subject matter overlap ours in countless ways.”— William Patten (1920), Social Philosophy of a Biologist
“Since my name is not Socrates or Einstein and I hold only one of the seven or eight PhD degrees [organic chemistry] this problem requires, readers are quite justified in questioning my qualifications to testify as such a multidisciplinary expert.”
— George Scott (1985), on the ethics and physical chemistry of will
“The grandiose building of modern human knowledge, growing before our eyes with impressive acceleration, shows now some features that resemble the story of the construction of the Babylon Tower. As time goes on, the specialization of science becomes deeper and deeper, so that the ‘builders’ of its different domains lose the ability to understand each other. It is happening because the division of science into different branches is artificial and reflects its preceding path of development rather than the natural interlinks or similarities between the phenomena that they deal with. Economics and thermodynamics represent just one example of this kind. They are located far enough from each other on the tree of science that their branches do not intersect. Students of both disciplines are mostly ignorant of ideas and methods of the other side. Specialists in both sciences publish their works in different journals and do not assemble together at common conferences.”— Octavian Ksenzhek (2007), Money: Virtual Energy: Economy through the Prism of Thermodynamics
“One of Samuelson's many novel contributions was that he generalized and applied mathematical methods developed for the study of thermodynamics to the field of economics. His inspiration for doing so came, in part, from his mentor, polymath Edwin Wilson who was a former Yale student of the founder of chemical thermodynamics, Willard Gibbs. Samuelson, therefore, is a successful example of interdisciplinarity, and he combined these ideas in his magnum opus Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947).”
A depiction of interdisciplinarity involving a discussion of the overlap of mathematics and genetics, creating new hybrid type of mathematical genetics subject. |
“Immaturity, lack of imagination, ‘doctrinaire departmentalism’, and [in particular] overspecialization is choking modern scholarship and limiting man’s communication with his fellows.”— John Q. Stewart (1955), commentary on efforts to initiate an interdisciplinary social physics department at Princeton [1]
“The likes and dislikes of living beings were compared with the chemical affinities of many compounds. It would appear that a parallelism between human behaviour and physico-chemical interaction has been felt for a long time but the reverse does not seem to have attracted the attention of either the social scientists or the physicists and chemists, possibly because of the compartmentalization of these branches of science into different faculties.”— Mirza Beg (1987), New Dimensions in Sociology (pg. 2)