Abstract
In this chapter, the general enterprise of the book is introduced along with the general reasons why the topics discussed are worth considering at all. I present the positions and theoretical elements on which the discussions of the following chapters are based. The most central concepts of the framework to be developed, as well as some terminology that is crucial for the subsequent analyses, are outlined. All in all, this chapter serves to prepare the reader for the more detailed discussions in the rest of the book.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this manuscript (except for this note) ‘single inverted commas’ are used when referring to words, whereas “double inverted commas” are used when referring to concepts. Following one of several Scandinavian traditions “double angle quotation marks” are used for in-text quotations as well as scare quotes.
- 2.
Depending on one’s favourite textbook.
- 3.
An anonymous referee commenting on an early version of (Hvidtfeldt 2017) responded to my claim that interdisciplinary activities ought to be carried out “cautiously, systematically, and stringently” with the comment: “hm… but you know, in ID it is precisely the opposite attitude that you need…”.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
The idea of construing outputs of science in terms of conditionals is inspired by ideas presented by Peter Godfrey-Smith in a series of lectures at The University of Sydney in 2015.
- 7.
Arguably, physics, chemistry, and biology are the places to make your mark if you want to “be someone” in contemporary analytical philosophy of science.
- 8.
Actually, quite a bit more inclusive than either of them considers explicitly, I believe.
- 9.
I will discuss this in some detail in Chap. 5.
- 10.
The attentive reader will remember that van Fraassen’s requirement is that something is “used, made, or taken” to represent something else. I will focus on use in the following, since I take it that “use” may function as a generic concept under which “made” and “taken” can be subsumed.
- 11.
A dog you will have to take for a walk (= significant activity demand). A cat you will have to poke with your walking stick when it is about to urinate on the carpet again (= medium activity demand). A canary you will only have to feed occasionally, and flush in the toilet when it dies (= low activity demand).
- 12.
As is well known, the original formulation runs as follows: “By the explanandum, we understand the sentence describing the phenomenon to be explained (not that phenomenon itself); by the explanans, the class of those sentences which are adduced to account for the phenomenon” (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948, p. 136 f.).
- 13.
Once we get to my discussion of the elaborated duplex version of Giere’s representational relation in Chap. 7, I will assume that the W in Giere’s formalisation refers to target systems rather than real world aspects.
- 14.
This will, I promise, eventually make sense.
- 15.
I thank John Matthewsson and Peter Godfrey-Smith for independently pointing out the need for some notion of “disciplinary distance” in discussions of this project during my stay at The University of Sydney in 2015.
- 16.
I disagree, then, with a lot of the existing treatments of interdisciplinarity in which it is assumed that disciplines have a “virtual monopoly of expertise on their subject matter” (Weingart 2010, p. 9). In a lot of cases such a generalisation would not pass an empirical test. This superficial view, I claim, is an artefact of uncritically basing ones understanding of interdisciplinary integration on conventional disciplinary taxonomies.
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Hvidtfeldt, R. (2018). Introduction. In: The Structure of Interdisciplinary Science. New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90872-4_1
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