interdisciplinarity

I've been thinking more about disciplines after posting a few days ago on "tricking oneself out of disciplinary biases" (http://www.hastac.org/node/1454). Now I'm thinking about disciplinary shame and fudging. Is that one of the most important (unspoken) rules a discipline has to teach? Where to blur the lines?

I'm curious about why so many popular and scientific books go from highly empirical and careful analysis of data to the most mind-boggling leaps of faith into the realms of evolutionary biology, the new science fiction, the new scientific theology.

How do we know what we know? How do we know when we know it--or when we are merely generalizing to some theory on the basis of an experiment that may or may not lead exclusively to that theory? It's not an easy call.

In welcoming participants to the HASTAC conference, I outlined many of the ways that working across domains is exactly what makes for paradigm shifts. The Information Age is too important to leave only to the domain of scientists and engineers. We all need to work together to understand this moment.