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The Medial Character of Interdisciplinarity: Thinking in the Middle Voice By ISSUES IN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES No. 35, pp. 29-52 (2017) The Medial Character of Interdisciplinarity: Thinking in the Middle Voice by Wendell Kisner Associate Professor and Program Director of the Master of Arts in Integrated Studies Program Athabasca University Abstract: Little research has been done on philosophical implications of the middle voice of early Greek and certain non-Western indigenous languages. In particular, the potential of such a medial ontology has yet to be even explored, much less realized, within the context of interdisciplinary studies. As a linguistic structure indicating an ambiguous middle ground between active and passive voices, the middle voice suggests a medial ontology that I develop with reference to Plato’s late dialogues. I argue that conceiving interdisciplinarity in medial terms integrates at least some otherwise disparate interdisciplinary approaches, approaches that themselves stem from different disciplinary spheres of infuence. Rather than proposing a global theory of interdisciplinarity, this article defends the medial resolution of a tension within interdisciplinary studies between construction and discovery, thereby suggesting an ontological point of departure for the development of such a theory. Keywords: middle voice, Plato, interdisciplinary studies, interdisciplinarity, ontology, science, humanities, learning Introduction There has been scant research done on the philosophical implications found in the middle voice of early Greek and certain non-Western indigenous languages. While it is ordinarily regarded as a linguistic structure situated ambiguously between the active and the passive, some have argued that it suggests a medial ontology that facilitates understanding certain kinds of phenomena that would otherwise prove to be diffcult if not impossible to properly grasp (Bigger, 1996, 2005; Scott, 1989). While the potential of such a medial ontology has yet to be realized in many domains, philosophical appropriations of the middle voice have been made within hermeneutic, biological, historical, and ecological 30 | Kisner registers (Eberhard, 2004; Kisner, 2014; La Greca, 2014; Llewellyn, 1991, respectively). However, its usefulness within the context of interdisciplinary studies has not yet been explored. In this article I argue that learning in general is an emergent phenomenon whose process can best be characterized in terms of a medial ontology. Such an ontology can account for possibilities of emergent novelty in the learning process that are encountered in an ambiguous “middle ground” between active mastery and passive reception. Drawing from Plato’s late dialogues, I then argue that conceiving interdisciplinarity in such terms opens a path toward the integration of the otherwise apparently disparate interdisciplinary approaches of the empirical sciences on the one hand and the humanities and social sciences on the other, on the basis that the tension between them is based upon metaphysical assumptions that we need not make. Rather than proposing a global theory of interdisciplinarity, this article defends the ontological resolution of a tension within interdisciplinary studies between construction and discovery and, in doing so, points toward a possible departure point for the development of such a theory. A Tension in Interdisciplinarity Angus McMurtry (2009) identifes two general orientations within interdisciplinarity as practiced: orientation to the thing itself and orientation to human access to the thing. He argues that interdisciplinary practice generally falls on either side of this divide between the phenomena-focused and the socioculturally-focused without bridging them. Whereas the “hard” sciences tend to engage in interdisciplinarity in order to solve a problem in the thing itself, the humanities and social sciences tend to engage in interdisciplinarity in order to assemble a useful variety of approaches to the thing itself. We might characterize these two orientations as involving a tension between discovery and construction. Put differently, this tension is a contemporary manifestation of the age-old opposition between realism and idealism.1 Ted Toadvine has highlighted some of the problems that arise when construction and discovery are perceived as separate and respectively relegated to the humanities and sciences. Although he has in view primarily 1 Although this tension is most visible in the modern contrast between the humanities and the empirical sciences, it is not always or only articulated in this way. With respect to art objects vis a vis history, philosophy, and linguistics, Mieke Bal observes that “both the respect due to the objects and the need to analyze critically whether and how they serve the people they address in the most adequate way are two requirements potentially in tension with each other,” leading her to conclude that tension per se “is indispensable and sometimes overrules the wished-for integration.” (Repko et al., 2012, p. 92) I argue that such tension, far from being indispensable, is in fact based upon a false dichotomy that is resolved through an ontological clarifcation suggested by the middle voice. The Medial Character of Interdisciplinarity | 31 the kind of interdisciplinary practices associated with environmental issues, I believe they can be generalized to the feld of interdisciplinary studies per se. According to him, many of the misconceptions of interdisciplinarity come down to two erroneous assumptions: that “‘problems’ are just given, independently of any context or values, and independently of any disciplinary assumptions,” and that “the methods specifc to the humanities, which I call ‘hermeneutic’ methods in contrast to the empirical methods of the sciences, have no signifcant role to play of their own outside of a problem-solving context” (Toadvine, 2011, p. 3). Revisiting the now commonly made claim that the way problems are identifed and framed is not value free, Toadvine argues for the necessity of a more robust contribution to interdisciplinarity from the humanities in general and from the feld of hermeneutics in particular. He rightly argues that framing problems exclusively in empirical terms serves to conceal normative issues that may also be operative, and if humanities scholars merely dress up such empiricist assumptions for public consumption then their critical function, and thereby the kinds of unique contributions they can make, have been lost.2 But above and beyond the normative issues that may be concealed by empiricist assumptions, I would also suggest that the way problems are identifed and framed may conceal ontological assumptions that remain unquestioned both when empirical approaches are privileged and when the contribution of the humanities is conceived solely in terms of meaning and values.3 For this reason I remain unsatisfed with Toadvine’s conclusion: 2 Robert Frodeman makes a similar assumption in his critique of Newell’s as well as Repko’s proposed interdisciplinary procedures (Frodeman, 2014, pp. 44 and 56, footnote 7). 3 “Ontology” is the study of existence or being, and by ontological assumptions I mean assumptions about the being of the matter of inquiry that are not made explicit and wind up embedded within the way that matter of inquiry gets framed in terms of problems. Hence consigning the determination of “the facts” to empirical research while relegating the determination of value to the humanities remains unsatisfactory to the degree that the “facts” are themselves tacitly understood in terms of uncritically adopted ontological categories. Such ontological categories determine the way those facts appear as well as what constitutes a “fact” in the frst place. To inquire about how what are taken to be “facts” appear the way they do and what allows them to appear that way is to think at the ontological level, as opposed to taking such appearances at face value and then seeking to verify hypotheses about them. For example, one can em- pirically confrm or disconfrm statements about the chemical composition or market value of a painting by Mondrian. But when we step back and ask whether or not the being of this work of art is properly understood when framed as a physical object with measurable properties or a as a commodity in terms of exchange value, we are engag- ing in an ontological inquiry about the nature or being of art. It is at such an ontological level that I wish to address interdisciplinary learning and research. 32 | Kisner “Empirical research is needed to establish facts, while hermeneutical research interprets the broader implications of those facts for the meaning and value of our lives”(Toadvine, 2011, p. 4).4 The problem here is that the wedge indicated by McMurtry remains frmly in place – science tells us what the facts are, and the humanities and social sciences critically assess the way these given facts are framed in terms of problems.5 One side addresses the thing itself, while the other side addresses our access to it in terms of the normative values and meanings that frame it. Reality is seen to be given independently of any contribution on our part, with respect not just to the purported problems themselves but also to the way they get framed as problems in the frst place. So whereas McMurtry and Toadvine focus on interdisciplinary practices, I want to look at the ontological understanding of the world that informs these practices. As I will show, such an inquiry also responds to William Newell’s call for addressing interdisciplinarity at the
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