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Conceptual Foundations for Multidisciplinary Thinking. By Stephen Jay Kline. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. 337p. $45.
Courtney Brown, Emory University
Stephen Jay Kline undertakes an ambitious task with his book Conceptual Foundations for Multidisciplinary Thinking. His goal is to offer a schema, a philosophical template, within which the next generation of thinkers--all thinkers--can find an intellectual connectedness. This is the idea behind his focus on "multidisciplinary thinking." Thinkers in all disciplines, in his view, will need to decompartmentalize their way of thinking and face the new intellectual horizons with a more catholic, wide-angle perspective.
At its core, Kline's argument rests on the understanding that nearly all phenomena affecting humans involve numerous inputs, outputs, and feedback channels that together constitute variously complicated systems. He views single disciplines as having too narrow a perspective regarding many phenomena. The cause of this narrowness is not intellectual incompetence; rather, it results from the evolution of intellectualism characteristic of disciplines. Kline outlines a general model of this evolution and, in a sense, posits an explanatory theory of the historical development of human thought. The idea of systems is crucial here, because disciplines develop their own view of the components and processes associated with phenomena of interest to them. These views are incomplete system overviews that lead to what Kline calls "truth assertions." Truth assertions are statements or conclusions about phenomena that are based...