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Borrowed Knowledge: Chaos Theory and the Challenge of Learning across Disciplines ReviewThis is an interesting book, but both its ambitions and its accomplishments are of a much narrower scope then being "a book about everything," as another reviewer put it. Mostly, it's a book about interdisciplinary metaphors, and the philosophical foundations of a case for such metaphors' being useful. However, I'm not sure if the metaphor in its title is entirely successful.
The book's jumping-off point is the late-20th Century fad for "chaos theory." Although today most physicists don't recognize it as a distinct "theory," economists, lawyers and literature scholars, among others, were all to happy to suck it into their own academic papers. Some academics, especially some physical scientists, attack this kind of poaching as illegitimate. Stephen Kellert (SK), who is, as he often reminds the reader, a "disciplinary pluralist," sets out in this book to explore the factors that might legitimate such borrowings, and to consider criteria for judging when some borrowings are more justifed or successful than others.
SK approaches these tasks with the patience, and at times the fussiness, of an academic philosopher. Even though some fields -- e.g. rhetoric and linguistics (and esp. the subculture of the latter that calls itself "critical discourse analysis") -- set themselves tasks similar to SK's, he usually manages to be both broader and more even-tempered. For example, he has some interesting things to say about how facts and values are different but not always entirely distinct; but, as a pluralist, he can tolerate this ambiguity without feeling driven to accept relativism. And SK refuses to enter into some fights, such as over the legitimacy of neoclassical economics; he explains that the book's project "primarily focuses on the ways that borrowed knowledge is used within the fields of economics, law and literature as they are currently configured in the academy" (@91).
The proverbial general reader may find this deference to the academic status quo to be a limitation of the book. Moreover, some parts of the book seem to be spent on settling issues that only academics might find problematic. E.g., SK spends a couple of pages asking and answering "Why criticize metaphors?" (@122-124). To find such a question necessary, you'd probably have to be the same odd sort of person who doubts that your pet dog or cat has mental states. I often agreed with SK's conclusions about specific cases, e.g. about economists' use of value-laden terms like "efficiency" as if they were somehow "value-free," or about how some purported references to chaos were actually referring to, say, quantum mechanics. But these conclusions seemed for the most part quite obvious to any reader with some sensitivity to metaphor, and who took an intro college physics course or reads lots of popular physics books.
SK never provides a clear definition of "borrowed knowledge,", though he comes close when he describes how some economists "look over at physicists doing their first-order work [i.e., asking questions like, how do atoms work?], borrow some of their concepts or tools, and then use them to look back at their own objects of study in a new way. This is just the phenomenon of borrowed knowledge" (@27). We aren't ever given a clear definition of "knowledge" either, though SK reifies knowledge heavily. Not only can knowledge be "borrowed," but it can "produced" (mentions of "knowledge production" abound, e.g. 20, 30, 43-44, etc.), it "resides in a disciplinary location" (rather than in, say, peoples' heads) and can be "transported ... and (hopefully) returned" (@13).
Some of SK's examples struck me as aptly described by "borrowed knowledge." E.g. he mentions an economics paper that pointed out how chaotic physical phenomena forced physicists to use a wider variety of mathematical models than they had previously; the authors concluded that economists ought to consider that, by analogy, their own simple linear equations might not be adequate to describe economic phenomena (which is different from saying that economic phenomena follow the new physical models). An even clearer example might be a paper that actually demonstrates deterministic chaos in the dynamical behavior of some economic phenomenon -- though that might better be termed an "integration" than a "borrowing".
But what about when someone name-drops "glamorous jargon" (@108) to make their own work, however irrelevant, seem more important, modern, worthy of funding, etc. Is it really *knowledge* that's being borrowed here? or is it something more like prestige or an air of trendiness? SK notes that "knowledge production is always at least partially a matter of persuasion (@60);" but this doesn't mean that persuasion (esp. of the name-dropping kind) necessarily entails knowledge production.
In addition to such persuasive uses of borrowed knowledge, SK is no less interested in "inventive" uses, which rest on metaphors. Metaphors can play a "role in generating hypotheses from current conceptualizations and transforming those conceptualizations" (@111), e.g. by "defamiliarizing stagnant assumptions" (@114). They can "induce structure" in a target field [sc. of knowledge] that lacks structure, or can "reorder part [of a highly structured field], temporarily or permanently" (@111). But here again calling something a borrowing of "knowledge" seems to depend on what you're doing (examples are my own):
A. "The Mississippi River was a strange attractor for Huck Finn." I've used a buzzword, or perhaps even a concept from chaos theory. But did I borrow knowledge? Are concepts sufficient to constitute knowledge? For example, is "blue" knowledge?
B. "Money is like energy, it can neither be created nor destroyed." Here I'm doing more than borrowing a concept, I'm also asserting something to be true about money's relation to other things (the universe, e.g.), based on my knowledge about energy in the physical world. So far so good, but the statement is false as to money, since the US Treasury can print more of it. Should one say that knowledge has been borrowed unsuccessfully, or just that it's a lousy metaphor (or simile, for rhetorical purists)? Does the answer change if the context shows that my intention was persuasive rather than inventive (e.g., that I was just trying to bamboozle my audience, who might know next to nothing about physics or money)? Now what if the statement turns out to be false about physics, too -- was there ever any "knowledge" to be borrowed?
My sense from the book is that SK would say *all* of these cases count as "borrowed knowledge". (SK does say that "getting the science wrong dooms an attempted metaphorical borrowing" sometimes, though not always, @129-130.) If so, then I think the phrase may be too broad to be helpful. Why not just use "borrowed concept" or "interdisciplinary analogy" for some of these cases, instead of lumping them all under the "borrowed knowledge" label? SK might justify this on grounds of being a "pluralist," but for the general reader "knowledge" is what SK calls a "thick" term, carrying a lot of evaluative connotations (like: dude, it's really true).
Parts of this book can be entertaining if you've studied some physics, and interesting if you're involved with interdisciplinary studies, or if you don't often read much about metaphors and discourse analysis. But the ambiguity of its definition of knowledge and the obviousness of some of its case studies ultimately made me suspect that the book is salted with a pinch of "glamorous jargon," itself.
Borrowed Knowledge: Chaos Theory and the Challenge of Learning across Disciplines OverviewWhat happens to scientific knowledge when researchers outside the natural sciences bring elements of the latest trend across disciplinary boundaries for their own purposes? Researchers in fields from anthropology to family therapy and traffic planning employ the concepts, methods, and results of chaos theory to harness the disciplinary prestige of the natural sciences, to motivate methodological change or conceptual reorganization within their home discipline, and to justify public policies and aesthetic judgments.Using the recent explosion in the use (and abuse) of chaos theory, Borrowed Knowledge and the Challenge of Learning across Disciplines examines the relationship between science and other disciplines as well as the place of scientific knowledge within our broader culture. Stephen H. Kellert's detailed investigation of the myriad uses of chaos theory reveals serious problems that can arise in the interchange between science and other knowledge-making pursuits, as well as opportunities for constructive interchange. By engaging with recent debates about interdisciplinary research, Kellert contributes a theoretical vocabulary and a set of critical frameworks for the rigorous examination of borrowing.
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