Is Specialization Impeding the Production of Useful Knowledge?
Bernard Phillips bernieflps@aol.com I wonder whether what we need today in our discipline perhaps more urgently than ever before is a movement that will address the problems we now face, such as how to integrate the broad knowledge within the discipline and how to apply that knowledge to gain understanding of pressing problems, such as accelerating possibilities for mass annihilation with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons by terrorist or governmental groups. Over the past three years I’ve been attempting to develop a scientific method that opens us up to enormous range of knowledge locked up within the compartmentalized fields of our discipline, granting that these efforts come to no more than the proverbial drop in the bucket. In my just-published Beyond Sociology’s Tower of Babel: Reconstructing the Scientific Method (Aldine de Gruyter, 2001), I attempted to sketch and illustrate an approach that promises to build bridges connecting our specialized areas, developing an approach
