What does Interdisciplinarity mean?

Professor Louise Barrett, IAS Fellow for Syntactical Structures and the Evolution of Mind and Culture, October – December 2024. 

My career has been defined by crossing traditional academic boundaries, working at the intersections of anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary ecology, and more recently, philosophy, and cognitive science. I've moved from studying primate social systems in the field to exploring embodied cognition; from analyzing biological markets to investigating philosophical questions about the nature of mind. This breadth reflects my conviction that understanding behaviour—whether of vervet monkeys or humans—requires integrating multiple perspectives, and that an interdisciplinary approach is the only possible way to understand complex behaviour.

More broadly, interdisciplinarity means recognizing that real-world problems rarely respect the artificial and arbitrary boundaries we've created between academic fields. When I study how primates navigate their social and physical environments, I need tools from ecology to understand resource distribution, from psychology to analyze social cognition, from evolutionary biology and biological anthropology to consider evolutionary contexts, and from philosophy to question our assumptions about mental processes. For me, interdisciplinarity also means a recognition that, as no single theoretical framework or methodology can capture the full richness of the phenomena we study, we have to cultivate a great deal of intellectual humility.

The power of interdisciplinary work is evident in my research on vervet monkeys, where our research team has integrated behavioural observations with thermal biology, parasitology, network analysis, and computational modelling. This integration has yielded insights that wouldn't have otherwise emerged; for instance, how social networks influence thermoregulatory strategies. My work on embodied cognition further exemplifies my commitment to interdisciplinarity. Moving beyond brain-centric views of mind required engaging with philosophical traditions like phenomenology and analytical psychology, along with empirical findings from cognitive psychology, ecological psychology, and evolutionary theory.

Perhaps most importantly, interdisciplinarity reflects a commitment to following questions wherever they lead, and a willingness to encounter and work with unfamiliar concepts and new methods. This, in turn, means that collaboration lies at the heart of meaningful interdisciplinary work. In my research, I have been lucky to connect with a wide variety researchers who each speak different disciplinary "languages."

My fellowship at the IAS, working on the "Syntactical Structures" project, was one of the most intellectually stimulating experiences of my academic career. The project's four thematic areas—examining syntax through cognition, cultural evolution, narrative, and aesthetics—provided a comprehensive framework that continuously revealed new connections that I hadn’t recognised previously. I was particularly drawn to discussions around narrativity and how humans use narrative syntax to make sense of their world—as discussed by the other visiting fellow on our project, Paul Armstrong—which helped shed new light on my own research. Our weekly workshops also led me to the realization that, even when ideas from different areas proved to be completely incompatible, they generated a kind of productive friction: we had to think that much harder and more imaginatively to come up with new ideas that could combine different disciplinary insights without contradiction. In this respect, the leadership of Professors Barton, Clay, and Byford was invaluable: they created a supportive yet intellectually rigorous atmosphere, encouraging us to discuss and dissect each other’s ideas robustly but with generosity, and with a clear sense that we were working as a team to meet our shared goals.