differentiation fifty years on...

Robert Bellah wrote with regard to the hypotheses of the various sciences and sociologies that differentiation had gone as far as it could, and the time had come for integration of the academic disciplines. That was half a century ago.

Today we continue to have half-baked syntheses by well-meaning specialists who fall for fashionable theories in areas outside their own specialization, theories that embarrass anyone with real knowledge of the field.

How do we hold the reductionists' feet to the fire (or any other fossilized metaphor of your choosing)—how do we insist that it is not enough for them to make up facile just-so stories to dismiss any data that doesn't fit their own hypotheses—without falling into half-baked hypotheses of our own that are based on our own ignorance?

I can think of some operating procedures by which to define topics that it might be meaningful to investigate, versus ones that seem intrinsically too fragmentary to discuss meaningfully, much less investigate. Can we create, more importantly do we have any interest in creating, an agenda of unfinished intellectual business on which several disciplines might work cooperatively while accepting the inevitable difficulty that the results may not satisfy all comers? At least making a beginning would allow us to have an intellectually substantial conversation—such as occurs sometimes on the Edge.org website.