The Creative Potential of Interdisciplinarity in an Epistemically Fragmented Academia

Abstract

The internal organization of academic disciplines in contemporary academia is progressively falling under pressures of market economy. Economic parameters such as division of labor and market value have come to play an increasing role in organizing and shaping the epistemic structures of academic disciplines, resulting in an endless fragmentation and stratification of academic disciplines into ever-shrinking fields. As a result, academia has taken on the shape of academic factories, with an epistemically segmented society of academics and scientists that are unable to perform cross-disciplinary communication. The goal of this paper is twofold: first, to draw attention to the external pressure on academia as a potential source of epistemic fragmentation, and second, to display the ability of interdisciplinarity to overcome epistemic fragmentation, and to restore a level of epistemic unity as a core element of the academia.