Issue4 【jet】

jinluevaUID: 2390375

With the appearance and prosperity of inter disciplines and progressively frequent exchange and share of information across different fields of study, more and more scientists in variety of domains pay their attention to knowledge and researching methods in other domains unfamiliar to them in hope of adding an different dimension to the system of their own studies. On the other hand, experts also attempt to avert their domains, for example, from philosophy to social science, to continue their academic lives constructing an mixed sub-disciplines. Cooperation across domains has been encouraged by both governments and academia, which have been pictured as win-win games benefiting each side of participants. Moreover, students from totally different majors, as long as occupying the basic skills, are welcomed by professors in many fields of study, such as economics, psychology and business. So what is the underlying logic for these phenomena?

To answer this question, it is crucial for one to trace back the origin of numerous academic fields existing in our time. As we have been educated ever since we walk into the domain of science, our knowledge, and thus science, comes from the desire and seeking for the unknown. And the first of them is naturally philosophy, which in its early times trying to explain the existence of humanity and the reasonability of our society. Subsequently, many of the most significant fields of sciences, such as mathematics, biology, ethnics, physics and chemistry originated from philosophy and others from them. Therefore, all our knowledge actually shares the same root and thus, firmly related as a whole, which we call our civilization of humanity.

Naturally, from the above point of view, the borders between domains are hardly clear and strong enough to separate the communication of all fields of science. The most strong and well-known instance is probably Aristotle, whom has been noted as the encyclopedia of the Ancient Creek. Aristotle, as one of the "big three" of Hellenism, devoted his life to observations and track records of the nature and society, which has been showed in his masterpieces. From his great work, ancient philosophy had first been generally separated into logics, social science, mathematics, biology, and physics and so on. Ever since his time, scientists usually have their names in many correlating fields, such as Da Vince, Newton, Descartes and Einstein. At least, research in every fields need methodology from epistemology as its foundation. That is why we can find similar reasoning methods in almost all subjects.

Notwithstanding, it is in our time of notable development of science and technology and explosion of information that the indispensable communication among academic domains becomes a real barrier. The progressively wide gap in academic kingdom has obstructed the communication through differentiating different and complicated systems and adoption of incomprehensible academic languages. Specialists, those who can and only can perform in a narrow field, spring out and hardly any effort has been made to make them understand each other. Even among the sub-disciplines of one fields, experts have difficulty communicating with their counterparts. Without the versatile leaders of scientists, such as Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein, no clear direction or common rules could be posited. All of these are source of academic stagnation for our days. Under this circumstance, we create many most of which are totally meaningless, and we develop our own regardless of the potential help from other domains. That is why we call for outsiders to bring in fresh blood for the construction of bodies of our own fields.

In sum, to gain further path-breaking success in academia, the help from outsiders is indispensable.

[ 本帖最后由 jinlueva 于 2008-2-22 17:09 编辑 ]