Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker visited UC Berkeley back in February as a part of the Conversations with History lecture series. In this talk he focused on the development of his understanding of human nature, including some discussion of his most recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Understanding Human Nature with Steven Pinker - Conversations with History

Published on Apr 1, 2014 
(Visit: http://www.uctv.tv/)


Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Harvard's Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, for a discussion of his intellectual journey. Pinker discusses the origins and evolution of his thinking on human nature. Topics include: growing up in Montreal in a Jewish family, the impact of the 1960's, his education, and the trajectory of his research interests. He explains his early work in linguistics and how he came to write his recent work, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In the conversation, Pinker describes the importance of interdisciplinary research and analyzes creativity. He concludes with a discussion of how science can contribute to the humanities and offers advice to students on how to prepare for the future.

Recorded on 02/04/2014. Series: "Conversations with History" [4/2014]

Dr. Robert Pippin, who is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, gave the keynote talk at the Interdisciplinary Futures Symposium, held in honor of Emory's Institute of Liberal Arts 60th anniversary celebration on October 24, 2013.

Transdiciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity, Reductive Disciplinarity, and Deep Disciplinarity

Marcus Feldman - Cultural Contingency and Gene-Culture Coevolution

This is a very interesting and informative talk (the parts I fully grasped, anyway) about the interplay between genes and culture in human evolution. Marcus Feldman (Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, Director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, Stanford University) was one of the pioneering population geneticists in the study of gene-culture coevolution, going back to 1973.

His specific areas of research include the evolution of complex genetic systems that can undergo both natural selection and recombination, and the evolution of learning as one interface between modern methods in artificial intelligence and models of biological processes, including communication. He also studies the evolution of modern humans using models for the dynamics of molecular polymorphisms, especially DNA variants. He helped develop the quantitative theory of cultural evolution, which he applies to issues in human behavior, and also the theory of niche construction, which has wide applications in ecology and evolutionary analysis.

Here is a link to a 1985 paper on gene-culture coevolution: Gene-culture coevolution: Models for the evolution of altruism with cultural transmission (w/ L L Cavalli-Sforza, and J R Peck. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Vol. 82(17), pp. 5814-5818, September 1985; Evolution)

Cultural Contingency and Gene - Culture Coevolution

Published on Jul 22, 2013

Speaker: Marc Feldman, Stanford University, SFI Science Board
Response: Henry Wright, University of Michigan, SFI Science Board
May 3, 2013

New Perspectives in Evolution - Symposium
May 02, 2013 - May 04, 2013
Santa Fe, NM

This annual SFI Science Board meeting will focus on building a vision for future SFI research directions. The topic this year focuses on new quantitative, biological, and cultural perspectives on evolution.

Click here to download the agenda.

Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: Ten Years Later

Perhaps more than any other branch of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis (in the last two or three decades) has moved to embrace and integrate the discoveries of neuroscience and neurobiology. The most progressive example of this trend is the group of interpersonal neurobiologists around Dan Siegel, Allan Schore, Alan Fogel, and many others, nearly all of whom come from a psychoanalytic background.

In the video below is a discussion about psychoanalysis and neuroscience that took place in 2010 at the Philoctetes Center, featuring a roundtable discussion with Cristina Alberini, Heather Berlin, Vittorio Gallese, Robert Michels, Donald Pfaff, and Mark Solms. The conversation was in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis.

Of the speakers in this discussion, I am most familiar with Mark Solms, primarily through his book, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of the Subjective Experience. He is scheduled to be in Tucson later this year at the Psychoanalytic Society, a talk I look forward to attending.

Here the brief introduction to the event below:

It's been over ten years since the first issue of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis was published, and almost twenty years since an ongoing series of meetings between psychoanalysts and neuroscientists was initiated at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. This roundtable will discuss and review the progress made, the pitfalls and the gains, and the attempt to delineate possible paths forward in this emerging interdisciplinary field.

Roundtable Participants:

Cristina Alberini is Associate Professor of Neuroscience, Psychiatry, and Structural and Chemical Biology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Her current research interest is in learning and memory.

Heather A. Berlin is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where she also completed an NIMH Postdoctoral Fellowship, and conducts research with brain lesion and impulsive, compulsive, and dissociative disorder patients. Dr. Berlin has conducted clinical research with diverse psychiatric and neurological populations in both the U.S. and the U.K., and has published her research in a number of prominent journals. She has taught at Vassar College, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, conducting courses on the Neurobiology of Consciousness. She is interested in the neural basis of the dynamic unconscious.

Vittorio Gallese is Professor of Human Physiology at the University of Parma, where he teaches cardiovascular physiology and neurophysiology in the School of Medicine. He also teaches neuroscience in the graduate program in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Bologna. His main research interest lies in the relationship between action perception and cognition, and has published several papers about mirror neurons.

Robert Michels is Walsh McDermott University Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is also Joint Editor-in-Chief of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and Deputy Editor of The American Journal of Psychiatry.

Donald Pfaff is Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and Behavior at The Rockefeller University. He is a brain scientist who uses neuroanatomical, neurochemical and neurophysiological methods to study the cellular mechanisms by which the brain controls behavior. Dr. Pfaff is a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, a member of the Advisory Board of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He serves on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals.

Mark Solms is Professor and Chair of Neuropsychology in the University of Cape Town's Psychology Department, and is both a neuroscientist and a psychoanalyst. He has won numerous awards for his pioneering work in neuropsychoanalysis, including the International Psychiatrist Award from the American Psychiatric Association and Best Science Writing Awards. Solms has published 350 journal articles, book chapters, and six books. His book, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of the Subjective Experience, has been translated into 12 languages. Solms runs research initiatives at UCT, at the Arnold Pfeiffer Centre for Neuropsychoanalysis in New York, and at the Anna Freud Centre in London.

Three Lectures by Simon DeDeo from the Santa Fe Institute 2012 Complex Systems Summer School

There are three lectures embedded in the video below given by Simon DeDeo during the Santa Fe Institute 2012 Complex Systems Summer School, an interdisciplinary course for graduate and postdoctoral students in the mathematical, biological, cognitive and social sciences.

Full bibliography.

Below the video is much more detailed information on the lectures.

CSSS 2012 — Emergence

Update: all three Emergence lectures are now online, on both youtube and iTunes U. Lecture One ; Lecture Two ; Lecture Three.

We gave two accounts of emergence: one dealing largely with the properties of a system under coarse graining, the other dealing with the phenomenon of symmetry breaking.

Effective Theories for Circuits and Automata (free copy) is the guide for the first one, and makes a case for the use of coarse-graining and renormalization (Lecture One) in computational/functional systems that are not governed by a spatial organization (Lecture Two).

The second is much more widely discussed, and has made its way into the literature beyond the physical and mathematical sciences.

Lecture 1 (Monday morning)

The Central Limit Theorem as an example of Universality (skip Sec. 3.4 on Lattice Green Functions, unless you live in a crystal.) Aggregation (i.e., considering a system with more and more agents) One Particle and Many (skip Sec. 2.3 unless you are near zero Kelvin.) Both from Leo Kadanoff's readable (if you have some background in physics, chemistry or biochemistry) book Statistical Physics: Statics, Dynamics and Renormalization.

The third “universality class” — i.e., limiting distribution — that we discussed in our cartoon introduction (in addition to the log-normal, for languages, and the Fisher log-series, for ecosystems) is introduced in a Nature paper by Bohorquez, Gourley, Dixon, Spagat and Johnson in 2009.

The failure of Black-Scholes is discussed from the Mandelbrot point of view in many places, including The Misbehavior of Markets. The somewhat less media/physicist friendly account by Warren Buffet on how the non-stationary variance of the market functions is also worth reading, from his 2008 letter to shareholders (page 19.)

Robert Batterman's book, Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction, and Emergence has a readable and inspiring account of "explanation" and the role of effective theories. (Note that your lecturer does not follow his later account of emergence, which we discussed in a very different fashion.)

Our account of coarse-graining and renormalization group flow draws (hopefully clearly) from the very technical literature. One nice place to look if you have a physics mind-set is Michael Fisher's article, Ch. IV.8, in Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Field Theory (which includes a number of amazing articles, if you are game, on renormalization, effective theories, and emergence.)

Lecture 2 (Monday afternoon)

Techniques for finding the Bayesian best-match probabilistic finite state machine (a.k.a., Hidden Markov Model) for a particular string of observed behavior are described in Numerical Recipes, 3rd. Ed. (Press et al.) Chapter 16.3. Tapas Kanungo has a nice implementation of the E-M algorithm that is (somewhat) industry standard for the simple case.

We played Contrapunctus XIV in an arrangement for strings by the Emerson String Quartet. Then we played it again in MIDI form in Mathematica, then we truncated to the top two voices, and shifted both into a single octave to arrive at the process with only 104 output symbols (some of the 12x12 possible chords Bach did not use.) Then we tried to fit this process by a 12-state Hidden Markov Model. It did not sound very good, and this allowed us to discuss the limitations of finite state machines for processes with multiple timescales, hierarchies of interacting processes, and systems of greater computation complexity (e.g., the parenthesis-matching game.)

You may want to know how far Machine Learning can be pushed to produce "Bach-like" music, and whether (approximations to) higher-complexity processes might improve it. This is discussed in charming detail in Baroque Forecasting, by Matthew Durst and Andres S. Weigend, in Time Series Prediction, a volume from early meeting at SFI.

Group Theory, and the extension of the Jordan-Holder decomposition of groups to semigroups (i.e., the more general class of finite state machines with irreversible operations, such as the ABBA machine), forms a central theme of our discussion. Some very charming introductions to group theory exist (if one is not able to attend Douglas Hofstadter's classes at I.U.!) -- one perhaps suitable for visual thinkers is Visual Group Theory.

The Krohn-Rhodes theorem, which proves the consistency of a hierarchy of coarse-grainings for finite state machines, gets complicated. References to excellent papers by Christopher Nehaniv, Attila Egri-Nagy, and others can be found in the Effective Theories paper referenced above. The "Wild Book", photocopied and passed around in the 1970s, that made the case for the importance of the theorem, is now re-issued in a revised and edited version as Applications of Automata Theory and Algebra: Via the Mathematical Theory of Complexity to Biology, Physics, Psychology, Philosophy, and Games (just in case you thought there was something it might not apply to.)

Lecture 3 (Tuesday morning)

Our account of symmetry breaking as a canonical form of emergence is inspired by the foundational article More is Different (free copy), by SFI co-founder Phil Anderson.

The discussion of symmetry breaking in turbulence as one alters the control parameter is described elegantly in the beginning of Uriel Frisch's Turbulence.

Order Parameters, Broken Symmetry, and Topological Defects, by James P. Sethna is a readable and clear account of how this plays out in physics (that gets very advanced by the end!)

Our major example of a phase transition in a social/decision-making system was that found for the Minority Game when agents build strategies out of a finite-history list, from a paper by Damien Challet and Matteo Marsili (free copy). An excellent summary of what we know about the humble El Farol bar is at Minority Games: Interacting Agents in Financial Markets.

Philosophy v Science: Which can answer the big questions of life? - Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss

From The Observer (UK), this is an interesting conversation between a philosopher and a physicist on whether philosophy or science is better suited to answer life's most pressing questions. Although, I have to say this is somewhat pointless since neither alone will ever answer all of the questions, or any one question in full.

Each needs the other - philosophy of mind and consciousness have certainly been influenced and improved by neuroscience; and there could certainly be more philosophy of ethics included in the world of science.

Philosophy v Science: Which can answer the big questions of life?

Philosopher Julian Baggini fears that, as we learn more and more about the universe, scientists are becoming increasingly determined to stamp their mark on other disciplines. Here, he challenges theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss over 'mission creep' among his peers

• Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss
• The Observer, Saturday 8 September 2012

Does philosophy or science have all the big answers?

Julian Baggini No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science. When physics is compared with the humanities and social sciences, it is easy for the scientists to feel smug and the rest of us to feel somewhat envious. Philosophers in particular can suffer from lab-coat envy. If only our achievements were so clear and indisputable! How wonderful it would be to be free from the duty of constantly justifying the value of your discipline.

However – and I'm sure you could see a "but" coming – I do wonder whether science hasn't suffered from a little mission creep of late. Not content with having achieved so much, some scientists want to take over the domain of other disciplines.

I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere. Science was once natural philosophy and psychology sat alongside metaphysics. But there are some issues of human existence that just aren't scientific. I cannot see how mere facts could ever settle the issue of what is morally right or wrong, for example.

Some of the things you have said and written suggest that you share some of science's imperialist ambitions. So tell me, how far do you think science can and should offer answers to the questions that are still considered the domain of philosophy?

Lawrence Krauss Thanks for the kind words about science and your generous attitude. As for your "but" and your sense of my imperialist ambitions, I don't see it as imperialism at all. It's merely distinguishing between questions that are answerable and those that aren't. To first approximation, all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science.

Getting to your question of morality, for example, science provides the basis for moral decisions, which are sensible only if they are based on reason, which is itself based on empirical evidence. Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not. Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs.

The chief philosophical questions that do grow up are those that leave home. This is particularly relevant in physics and cosmology. Vague philosophical debates about cause and effect, and something and nothing, for example – which I have had to deal with since my new book appeared – are very good examples of this. One can debate until one is blue in the face what the meaning of "non-existence" is, but while that may be an interesting philosophical question, it is really quite impotent, I would argue. It doesn't give any insight into how things actually might arise and evolve, which is really what interests me.

JB I've got more sympathy with your position than you might expect. I agree that many traditional questions of metaphysics are now best approached by scientists and you do a brilliant job of arguing that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is one of them. But we are missing something if we say, as you do, that the "chief philosophical questions that do grow up are those that leave home". I think you say this because you endorse a principle that the key distinction is between empirical questions that are answerable and non-empirical ones that aren't.

My contention is that the chief philosophical questions are those that grow up without leaving home, important questions that remain unanswered when all the facts are in. Moral questions are the prime example. No factual discovery could ever settle a question of right or wrong. But that does not mean that moral questions are empty questions or pseudo-questions. We can think better about them and can even have more informed debates by learning new facts. What we conclude about animal ethics, for example, has changed as we have learned more about non-human cognition.

What is disparagingly called scientism insists that, if a question isn't amenable to scientific solution, it is not a serious question at all. I would reply that it is an ineliminable feature of human life that we are confronted with many issues that are not scientifically tractable, but we can grapple with them, understand them as best we can and we can do this with some rigour and seriousness of mind.

It sounds to me as though you might not accept this and endorse the scientistic point of view. Is that right?

LK In fact, I've got more sympathy with your position than you might expect. I do think philosophical discussions can inform decision-making in many important ways, by allowing reflections on facts, but that ultimately the only source of facts is via empirical exploration. And I agree with you that there are many features of human life for which decisions are required on issues that are not scientifically tractable. Human affairs and human beings are far too messy for reason alone, and even empirical evidence, to guide us at all stages. I have said I think Lewis Carroll was correct when suggesting, via Alice, the need to believe several impossible things before breakfast. We all do it every day in order to get out of bed – perhaps that we like our jobs, or our spouses, or ourselves for that matter.

Where I might disagree is the extent to which this remains time-invariant. What is not scientifically tractable today may be so tomorrow. We don't know where the insights will come from, but that is what makes the voyage of discovery so interesting. And I do think factual discoveries can resolve even moral questions.

Take homosexuality, for example. Iron age scriptures might argue that homosexuality is "wrong", but scientific discoveries about the frequency of homosexual behaviour in a variety of species tell us that it is completely natural in a rather fixed fraction of populations and that it has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts. This surely tells us that it is biologically based, not harmful and not innately "wrong". In fact, I think you actually accede to this point about the impact of science when you argue that our research into non-human cognition has altered our view of ethics.

I admit I am pleased to have read that you agree that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question best addressed by scientists. But, in this regard, as I have argued that "why" questions are really "how" questions, would you also agree that all "why" questions have no meaning, as they presume "purpose" that may not exist?

JB It would certainly be foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that what now appears to be a non-factual question might one day be answered by science. But it's also important to be properly sceptical about how far we anticipate science being able to go. If not, then we might be too quick to turn over important philosophical issues to scientists prematurely.

Your example of homosexuality is a case in point. I agree that the main reasons for thinking it is wrong are linked with outmoded ways of thought. But the way you put it, it is because science shows us that homosexual behaviour "is completely natural", "has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts", is "biologically based" and "not harmful" that we can conclude it is "not innately 'wrong'". But this mixes up ethical and scientific forms of justification. Homosexuality is morally acceptable, but not for scientific reasons. Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

Read the rest of the discussion.

Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman - A New Philosophy for the 21st Century

The Chronicle Review posted this article a while back by Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman on the need for a new philosophy for the 21st century - and they offers a series of reasons for this. They also offer three broad suggestions for reform and a new model for philosophy in the future, a return to a public role that philosophers once held:

By the beginning of the 20th century, we had abandoned the public role. Like biologists or economists, we embraced expertise. We burrowed down into ever-smaller niches, coming to know more and more about less and less.

It was a model that became self-justifying, by defining its own goals and standards and creating a closed market for the supply and demand for philosophy. Decrying this development in his 1906 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, William James argued for the recognition of both technical and general roles for philosophers. James lost that battle. Yes, 20th-century philosophy dealt with issues of perennial importance. But this work came at the cost of increasing cultural insignificance. The specialist's task was not counterbalanced by an equal emphasis on the public role of the philosopher.

It is time to reclaim the public role of philosophy.

I think they would like to see a more interdisciplinarity model for philosophy, although they do not spell that out very well.

Here is an excerpt from the much longer article, A New Philosophy for the 21st Century, by Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman.

Areas of reform: We see three broad, interrelated areas in need of reform.

First, we need to reconsider what counts as expertise, rigor, and excellence—the single-minded model of specialization that keeps us writing philosophy papers for each other. We should develop new, more interactive models of rigor that take account of the need for timeliness, sensitivity to context, and rhetorical skill in communicating with multiple audiences. And we should rank philosophy departments on measures other than publication counts in philosophy journals; other factors would include grants, for instance, or mentions in the press.

Second, a new philosophy calls for new types of philosophers trained with the skills necessary for being successful "interactional" experts. Interactional expertise means knowing enough about another field so that one can engage others in conversation and raise penetrat­ing questions. The pedagogical challenge before us consists in educating students so that philosophy is understood not as an isolated body of ideas, but as indistinguishable from human existence and interwoven throughout contemporary social issues.

Students need to learn how to identify and create opportunities for integrating philosophy outside of the discipline. Undergraduate students need courses that draw out the philosophical dimensions of everyday life—what a colleague of ours has called "found philosophy." Graduate students need training in grant writing and multimedia communication; policy and budgets; and rhetorical skills in how to make ethical theory relevant to different audiences within severe budgetary, time, or political constraints.

Third, the case for reform made here involves an appeal to prudential self-interest—devising ways to survive in a harried, impatient, and increasingly market-driven age. Philosophers have broad social responsibilities that require directly engaging social problems. This can mean activism, but in a bureaucratic age it is more likely to mean working at the project level with scientists, engineers, and policy makers. Rather than philosopher kings, our future is more likely to lie in becoming philosopher bureaucrats.

Of course, everyone hates bureaucrats. But they serve us well in keeping the trucks and trains and planes running on time and our food and medicine safe. As philosopher bureaucrats the two of us have helped the U.S. Geological Survey think about acid mine drainage; the city of Denton, Tex., rewrite its ordinance governing natural-gas drilling and production; and the European Commission devise better criteria for peer review of research grants.

Such work raises the worry that philosophy may compromise its essential function as social critique and become captured by powerful interests. In seeking to adapt, might philosophy risk selling its soul? Or, in speaking truth to power, might we be forced to drink hemlock?

These are real concerns. But such concerns simply highlight the need and opportunity for serious philosophic work. We must recognize that clinging to the status quo in the name of academic freedom is not just unsustainable but also irresponsible. Philosophers, like any professional group, have a moral responsibility to serve the community. We need to embody our own professional code of ethics.

New models: What new approaches to philosophy should we develop? Fortunately, we need not start from scratch, as alternative models are springing up daily. Individual philosophers, and occasionally whole departments, are striking out in new directions. The recent launch of the Public Philosophy Network is one indication of the growing interest in bucking the status quo. This past October, PPN hosted a conference on "Advancing Publicly Engaged Philosophy" in Washington.

Read the whole article.

Ted Toadvine - Six Myths of Interdiscipinarity (from Thinking Nature)

Thinking Nature Journal is a new online magazine, A Journal on the Concept of Nature. Here is a very brief statement from the editors when they posted Volume 1:

I hope that readers will find that the essays address the larger problem of trying to think nature in philosophical and ecological means and display the need for further inquiry into the conceptual.

There are many interesting articles in Volume 1, and they are currently seeking articles for Volume 2.

Volume 2 Call for Papers: Aesthetics
Posted on August 16, 2011 by Ben Woodard


For the second issue of Thinking Nature we are seeking papers which address the relation between nature and aesthetics. Writing on and about nature whether theoretical or not often relies on the aesthetic as a means of highlighting nature’s importance and the importance of ecological politics, activism, and living. For this issue we are seeking speculative and experimental approaches to the opportunity and problem of aesthetics as it crosses nature, the natural, and ecology.


Possible Topics:
Environmental Aesthetics
The relation of the sublime to nature and aesthetics
The importance of the visual for ecology/ecological critique
Anthrocentrism and Aesthetics or Aesthetics of the Inhuman
Aesthetics and the natural/artificial relation
Sentience and Aesthetics/Cognitive models and Aesthetics of Nature
Non-Visible Nature and Aesthetics


We are asking for completed manuscripts (in rough draft form or better) of 5,000 – 8,000 words with Chicago style references (footnotes and not endnotes).


We are also interested in art pieces, either single pieces or a small collection, either written, visual, or other.

The Deadline for submissions is January 31st 2012

Please email submissions to woodardbenjamin@gmail.com or timothymorton303@gmail.com

Posted below is the beginning of one of the articles I enjoyed from the first volume, from Thinking Nature V. 1.

/6/ - Six Myths of Interdiscipinarity
Ted Toadvine


Interdisciplinarity is a lot like biodiversity—everyone sings its praises, but no one really knows how to define it, how to measure it, or how to assess its actual value. There is, of course, a growing body of literature discussing interdisciplinarity from a theoretical perspective. It is not my aim here to analyze or contribute to those discussions, but rather to speak to the practical issues that emerge in the everyday contexts of academic collaboration. Specifically, I am interested in the role that the humanities play within the context of “broad interdisciplinarity” in environmental studies. By “broad” interdisciplinarity, I mean a conversation between disciplines that range across the spectrum from the natural sciences to the humanities. Interdisciplinary collaborations at finer scales—such as between biologists and landscape architects, or between painters and literary critics—often occur, of course. But “broad” interdisciplinarity poses a much greater challenge precisely because of the significant divergence, perhaps even incommensurability, between the ways that humanists and scientists define their problems and their methods. What interests me are the assumptions and narratives about interdisciplinarity that shape the academic context, including the development of curricula, the training of graduate students, the articulation of program goals, evaluations of research, and so on. In my view, these assumptions and narratives often constrain the contributions that humanists can make and limit the possibilities for genuine dialogue across disciplines. Here, my aim is to identify a few of these limiting assumptions, what I am calling “myths of interdisciplinarity,” in the hopes that doing so will encourage my humanist colleagues, first, to reflect more deeply on what our specific methods bring to the study of the environment and, second, to develop richer narratives about what broad interdisciplinarity might look like.


The first myth is that interdisciplinarity can be achieved by focusing on problem-solving. The usual understanding is that some environmental problem – e.g., water resource allocation, biodiversity loss, energy production, and most commonly today, climate change – is taken as the focal point of a discussion to which the different disciplines add their unique “perspective.” We each have our own toolkit or skill-sets, and genuinely interdisciplinary collaboration happens when we bring our distinct tools to bear on a common problem. This interpretation of interdisciplinarity is common in the theoretical and pedagogical literature and is mirrored by environmental studies mission statements and curricula across the country. Thus understood, humanists are expected to contribute their own useful perspective to solving specific environmental problems: the Pacific Salmon crisis, or the siting of toxic waste dumps, or fuel efficiency. And what will the contribution of literary critics, painters, philosophers, and poets be to solving such problems?

Read the whole article.