Interdisciplinarity in Norbert Wiener, a mathematician-philosopher of our time

Abstract

The paper focuses on interdisciplinarity in Norbert Wiener looking at his scientific work from a unitary point of view. It begins with a bird's-eye view of the history of the term “interdisciplinarity”, pointing out how the word was the result of a movement of ideas that took place in US science along the whole Twentieth century. This way, the Wiener's conceptions and practices concerning interdisciplinarity are compared with their historical context, showing analogies and peculiarities. For Wiener, interdisciplinary research by very small groups whose members have a very broad interdisciplinary basis is an essential prerequisite for new fundamental ideas for invention and discoveries. On the contrary, in his opinion, mass attacks by large well financed interdisciplinary research groups with a big number of overspecialized member is useful only in a second phase in which invention and discoveries need to be implemented by designers and developers. Finally, through a conceptual matching between Wiener's ideas and the ones of José Ortega y Gasset, it appears how the Wienerian small interdisciplinary group would fit better with the Kuhnian revolutionary phase in science, while the big interdisciplinary group would fit better to the Kuhnian normal science.