Two flavours of interdisciplinary work
A brief note
Hello, dear readers! Today, I want to share a brief rant about interdisciplinary work. It is partly an excuse to whine and partly a way to articulate something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. After that, we’ll have the usual recommendations and otters.
Whenever I see the word “interdisciplinarity” and its variants, I am of two minds. On the one hand, I am very sympathetic to scholars who manage to draw from other disciplines, and my studies in computer science, philosophy, and STS heavily inform my own legal work. On the other hand, I am somewhat bored by attempts to invoke (or defend) interdisciplinarity as a legitimate approach to research. Drawing from other disciplines where relevant is, in my view, nothing more than scholarly due diligence rather than something warranting special praise.1 So, whenever I see somebody speaking too much about the virtues and challenges of interdisciplinary, I often tune out.2
Why is that the case? There are various material reasons relating to zero-sum games in funding, academic prestige, etc. But part of what annoys me about these debates is a matter of style. In my limited experience, there are two kinds of interdisciplinary scholars: those who rely on binary distinctions, those who don’t, and those who can’t count. The first kind is what I call open interdisciplinarity: looking at other disciplines as sources of new research questions or tools for exploring the world. For example, David Lehr and Paul Ohm’s Playing with the Data draws from computer science to create a model of the development life cycle of AI systems. This model does not answer, in itself, any legal questions. Instead, it enables lawyers to do various things: identify overlooked issues, map potential levers for regulatory intervention, and engage with technical stakeholders. Here, using extra-disciplinary knowledge opens up new possibilities rather than closing them.
The opposite happens in what I call closed interdisciplinarity. Within this latter approach, the work of other disciplines is used to foreclose interpretive possibilities, using the authority of a discipline to disregard an argument or line of inquiry. I will not bring any examples for two reasons: first, it would be inelegant to diss somebody’s work if I am not actually responding to their arguments; second, to paraphrase the methods expert O. Little, one should not engage in such takedowns unless one knows what they are doing. But you probably have some examples in mind.3
From the description above, it might be clear that I am not neutral on this divide. Closed interdisciplinarity often relies on a shallow view of other disciplines, which sweeps legitimate debates and unsettled matters under the rug by saying that “discipline X says Y”. It also overlooks that, even when a position is established, it often relies on a whole lot of assumptions that are not obvious to the external observer.4 And, these days, I am terribly bored by arguments that try and bludgeon the reader into submission rather than offering possibilities for inquiry.5
This is not to say that I am immune to closed interdisciplinarity. For example, my typical reaction to debates on whether law is a science or not is, “please read anything published in the last 50 years on the philosophy of science rather than relying on a half-remembered Popper quotation.”6 And, if we are in the business of making sense of things, at some point we need to prune possibilities rather than to pile up stuff. But my view is that invoking other disciplines to do the pruning job, rather than to get a better picture of what needs to be pruned, is both a disrespect to the works of others and a waste of potential sources of insight into the questions that interest us.
Reading recommendations
Provided without further comment today, as I am about to leave for a conference, but here are some things that might interest readers of this newsletter.
Francesca Palmiotto Ettorre, When is a Decision Automated? A Taxonomy for a Fundamental Rights Analysis
Michele Gilman, DEMOCRATIZING AI: PRINCIPLES FOR MEANINGFUL PUBLIC PARTICIPATION
Gloria Golmohammadi, Realizing the Principle of Participatory Democracy in the EU: The Role of Law-Making Consultation
Marco Almada, Juliano Maranhão, Giovanni Sartor, Artificial Intelligence (work in progress, comments appreciated!)
Janet Abbate and Stephanie Dick (eds), Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society
Finally, the otters
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And this is one of the reasons why we need more multi-authored works, as nobody can be an expert in all the varied disciplines relevant to some of the major issues society faces.
Yet, I am myself writing on the subject. What can I say? I contain multitudes.
If not, a random sampling of articles in law and economics might be illustrative. I have nothing against law and economics in itself: some of my best friends work in that tradition, not all economists, and similar caveats. Still, the overlap between argumentative cultures in both disciplines often leads to some stuff that passes far away from any semblance of interpretive charity.
See, e.g., the question of whether it is possible to reconcile various conceptions of algorithmic fairness, and the works cited on previous issues that question the impossibility results that are taken for granted in legal debates about the topic.
Of course, if one needs to settle a practical dispute, there is no alternative to the old argumentation game. But, when it comes to the construction of knowledge, I must say I am more sympathetic to Nozick’s exploratory mode of inquiry.
A low bar, but one that is surprisingly effective in weeding out most of the relevant arguments.