by Timothy Dolan
Introduction
Perhaps nothing inhibits the development of integrative science more than the multiple disciplinary dialects that inflict a kind of semantic babble upon scholarly discourse. There are several examples starting with the most basic unit of analysis in the social sciences; that being people. If one is an anthropologist they are a culture. If an economist they are a market. If a political scientist they are the public”, and if a sociologist, “society”. Psychologists, and social workers, physicians and judges see “cases”, and the list goes on. It is part of a larger reductionism that takes place in both myth and theory; the two discourses themselves artifices of simplification of the world. The former simplifies in the language of poetry and literary prose, and the latter in the language of logic, math and science. It’s a profound problem and one that might speak to the focus of the symposium as “microvita” itself might be seen as something else from other disciplinary points of view.1(continue…)
Situating “Microvita” within the Panoply of Disciplinary Jargon