“Why are all the scientists specialized? why aren’t there any generalist scienti

–“Why are all the scientists specialized? why aren’t there any generalist scientists? What if there’s like a unifying paradigm that only makes sense if you understand all the pieces? What journal would you even publish it in, how would you get peer review from across the spectrum?”–@DefenderOfBasic

Great question.

Our organization (and me in particular) work on the unification of the sciences, universal commensurability, and the hierarchical expression of evolutionary computation.

The reason no such thing exists is because (a) it’s not possible to put a dissertation committee together for such a study (I tried). (b) the program takes (took us) too long part time from 1990 full time from 2009. (c) there is little opportunity for gradual publication. (d) the methodology for unification is outside of the domain of the sciences (it requires understanding of the foundations of mathematics, computation, grammars (linguistic semantics), cognitive science, physics, genetics, behavioral economics, and law – and the methodology is operationalism, object oriented analysis and design (simulation), including relational calculus. (e) So no one in the academic mill can take the time to master that may fields (my career allowed me to), and I was able to retire in my 40s to work on this project full time.

So the academy is not organized for, does not have the funding system for, cannot allow the time for, nor does it possess the epistemology for, nor does it possess the methodology for production of the unification of the sciences – or what E. O. Wilson called “Consilience”.

And what journal would we submit papers to? Who could understand it? Who has the base of knowledge to do so?

To make matters worse in the academy, the non STEM sciences try to solve for good before they solve for true and possible. This is partly why cognitive science replaced psychology and certainly why ‘economic imperialism’ has dominated the social sciences such that the other social sciences are buried in the replication crisis with more than half of papers absolute nonsense.

Our organization understands this. We are writing books. At least four volumes. The first should be out this year. The books you care about are volume twi (measurement) and three (logic). Two is almost done, needing final edit. Three is about halfway. Four is application to law, constitution, government, and policy. If you’re curious volume one explains the crisis of the age of which this particular problem is one of the issues addressed.

So your frustration is legitimate. Well founded. And as Kuhn said, the academy advances with Tombstones. So I expect it’s going to take either an intentional reform of the academy (which may happen because of its pending economics) or decades of painful realization of their failure before your intuition that ‘something is wrong’ is corrected.

Thanks for opening the discussion on this topic.

Cheers
CD

Reply addressees: @DefenderOfBasic