Specialization and Generalism
(first draft)

Since the nineteenth century scholarship of all kinds has been moving toward  specialization. The battle was won somewhere around 1950, and we’re now  living in the aftermath. Along with specialization with regard to topics came methodologization -- whatever the topic, scholarship should limit itself to the utilization of powerful, explicitly described methodologies. Since I have been a convinced eclectic and generalist since 1962 or so, I have not found the last forty years to be at all hospitable.

The specialized-expert model of scholarship, at its best, can lead to impressive discoveries, but it has its blind spots. At worst, when institutionalized it can force scholars into narrow and unproductive areas of study, and beyond that, it often leads to the thoughtless dismissal of work which is generalist or eclectic or both. The received arguments justifying the sole dominance of specialized-expert work are flawed. In my rambling way I’m going to point out some of these flaws below.

1. Disciplinary thinking often uses what seems to be naively physicalistic metaphors. Dividing science into “fields” mimics the kind of spatialization characteristic of the modern age (as seen in property rights in land and the multi-state international system), but no such division is really possible. Any given field of study may potentially be relevant to, or adjacent to, any other field of study.
    
2. Likewise, questions or research problems are not chunks of stuff that can be enumerated. A field of study consists of all the possibly-answerable questions that can be asked about some topic or within some framework of analysis. It excludes all kinds of questions which don’t seem to be answerable at a given time, but these questions remain potentially part of the field and new questions are frequently added to any given field. The questions not treatable within a discipline remain real, as questions,  in the larger context, even though they must be ignored in a disciplinary context.
   
   For example, the high point of positivist triumphalism was probably around 1800. However, the scientists of that time barely knew what oxygen was and had no understanding of metabolism or organic chemistry. They also had no idea what the source of the heat of the sun’s heat was, or that life on earth was entirely dependent on energy from the sun. Even in their own area of special interest, they hadn’t solved the three-body problem  -- and still less did they know that that problem could never be solved. There were large areas of reality which they simply chose to ignore because they couldn’t treat them scientifically.  But these areas and the questions about them were still real. The positivist triumph was fake. _[1]

3. Academic research excessively favors the analytic movement (dividing questions into managable parts) at the expense of the synthetic movement (putting things into a large context, or joining together previously-separated areas of study).  However, both movements are intellectually legitimate.
   
   In more or less the same way, academic research favors more-rigorous answers to smaller questions to more comprehensive discussions whose answers are, of necessity, less certain. (Often rigor and certainty are attained by the simple method of stipulating factors out and producing answers which are, in effect, purely hypothetical.)
    
4. All areas of scholarship, even in the humanities, are now dominated by the positivist need to have powerful, technical,  paradigmatic methods. It sometimes seems to be believed that the mere imposition of a paradigm is enough to scientize a field. However, the paradigms Kuhn was talking about had the advantage of being successful and powerful. Just any old paradigm won’t do.
   
   If an important question has not been mastered and made routine and  algorithmic by a powerful new paradigm, then the old, messy, eclectic methods must be used in order to come up with an approximative answer to the question. These methods have been called craft skills, exaptation, abduction, proto-science, bricolage, muddling through, and so on. (The “tool box” metaphor has been used both by Wittgenstein and Foucault: their philosophies offer you a variety of tools suited to various sorts of jobs that you might need to get done).
   
   One of the activities which has not become algorithmic, incidentally, is scientific discovery  itself. If there were an algorithm for scientific research, we’d know everything by now. Algorithms make investigation sure and routine ("normal"), but there's no general algorithm for discovering algorithms.
    
5. The inclusive, holistic discipline is thus a mixed, imperfect, non-algorithmic discipline which includes all the rigorous disciplines as components. Rather than stressing its imperfection, we should emphasize its comprehensiveness. Compare the generalist to the boss: in a well-run company, every subordinate should know his job better than the boss knows the boss’s job. This is because the boss is theoretically responsible for everything, and this especially includes the messy, unexpected things that come up which are not part of any underling’s job.
    
6. It would seem obvious that the job of thinking comprehensively is capable of being done either well or badly. But there are those who disagree:
   
   In earlier eras, when it was not obvious that the scope of human knowledge far exceeded what could be encompassed by a single mind, the challenge of explaining how everything hung together was not transparently unmanageable. Today – when single minds cannot encompass substantial sub areas of any established discipline – it is. The solution is not to do badly what cannot be done, but to do well what can – to construct a series of limited, but accurate and overlapping, syntheses that together illuminate reality as we know it. This, I argue, is what we should ask of analytic philosophy. (Scott Soames’ response to Richard Rorty)
   
   In fact, inclusive thinking can expect to be met with jeers. It will be assumed to be amateurish, second-rate, tainted with advocacy or devotional fervor, and directed toward the lowest common denominator. No reasons are ever given for these assumptions, which are regarded as obviously true.
    
7. One way of thinking about generalist writing is to think of two highly-intelligent friends who have specialized in widely different fields, but  who retain a curiosity about one another’s work. (Each, in other words, is a specialist in his own field, but a layman in the other’s). Imagine each of them writing a generalist description of his own field of study for the benefit of the other. The result would be two non-technical generalist works of the highest quality.
   
   Scientists seem less defensive about generalist writing than writers from fields that are regarded as “softer”. Right at hand I have excellent philosophical books by Stephen Jay Gould, Ilya Prigogine, Francisco Varela, Antonio Damasio, Stuart Kauffman, and Ernst Meyer. You only wish that philosophers would write that way.
    
8. The university has apparently abandoned generalist thought, which amounts to the abandonment of public philosophy to street preachers, demagogues, and hack journalists. Every department nowadays wants to be an expert discipline with specialist methodologies and paradigms, and the ones that think of themselves as more successful in this regard sneer at the others (“butterfly collecting and social work”.) 
   
   It seems reasonable that generalist thinking should be fostered in the university, and the departments where generalism would seem most appropriate are history, literature, and philosophy. But nowadays these departments, too, have been methodologized, so an eclectic generalist like me really has nowhere to go.
    

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