No field of study can advance significantly unless it incorporates knowledge and experience from outside that field.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
In modern society, academic scholars constantly learn from researchers outside their fields to make new progress in their own fields. I would like to illustrate the importance of incorporating knowledge and experience from outside the fields in terms of methodological tools, theoretical perspectives and new practices of research.
It is well known that many disciplines rely on some more fundamental fields for methodological tools. Most natural science and engineering fields cannot advance without the help of different mathematical models. The development of cryptography, for example, is not possible without the insights from number theory in general and specific theorems about prime numbers in particular. On the other hand, the advancement of pure mathematics is also aided tremendously by the use of computers which free the mathematicians from tedious calculation. This is why nowadays most introductory Calculus courses at college level would include some components of programming in Matlab.
Scholars in applied social sciences also need theoretical insights and inspiration from more basic social sciences. For example, the legal scholars on traffic laws can benefit from the incentive theory proposed by economists and study the effects of seat belt laws on the behaviors of drivers and how it might affect the safety of pedestrians. In fact, a whole new field known as law and economics has emerged with economic theories applied to the study of laws. Like the legal scholarship, many other fields of study need to incorporate theories from outside to make progress.
Finally, researchers may borrow new ideas and experience in research practices from outside their fields. The idea of crowdsourcing, for example, was first developed in the process of editing Oxford English Dictionary when a large group of amateurs were invited to contribute words to the editorial team. It was recently adopted as a research paradigm in different academic fields with the advent of the Internet. Even in pure mathematics, a crowdsourcing project known as the Polymath had successfully solved some difficult problems attracting mathematicians from all over the world. With the increasing communication among scholars across disciplines, more research practices such as crowdsourcing will be transferred from one field of study to another.
In conclusion, I agree that, in today’s academic world, incorporating knowledge and experience from outside the field of study is necessary for the further development of all different fields as researchers need methodological tools, theoretical insights and new ideas about research practices.