Identifying Concepts

To identify a discipline requires two variables: (1) a field of study and (2) a method of approach. A field and a method.

The medieval scholastics in the 10th-14th centuries published many useful ideas about what things are, how they relate, and the logical way to resolve some mind-spinning questions about what “things” are and how they interface with other “things.” The latin word quiddity — a thing’s thingy-ness — is a great example of the sort of conventions they had to construct in order to speak about the what-ness of what-as-such — or, the thatness of that per se. This sounds trivial to the uninitiated, but the questions which prompted these formulations and the issues at stake are the same issues being discussed in quantum physics and theoretical math. The difference is that, in medieval premodern philosophy, theologians often got stuck on the fact that, when they considered a thing’s thingy-ness, that stuff was real. The medieval scholastics did not consider these questions a matter of theoretical reflection, but of practical, material science.

The Disciplines, in academia, are those fields of inquiry which segment off from one another — this thing from that thing. Philosophy. Psychology. Linguistics. Math. Physics. They are all related, but they are all distinct. The logic of those relations and distinctions is what interests me, and their function, which is very organismic, fascinates me, as the study of ideas is often seen as something very removed from human life, but is actually no more abstract than the construction of a skyscraper or the piecing together of a toy trainset.

This topical space is intended to explore the nature of disciplines as they are, their relations to their fields of inquiry, and their methods for identifying and developing knowledge, method, and disciplinary / interdisciplinary distinctives.