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in academia, it is a bad career move to be interdisciplinary, unless you chosen choice of interdiscipline is trendy.
why? because in academia, hiring and promotion is decided by departmental committees. Some members of these departmental committees may like interdisciplinary work and some may not. But they can all agree on good work within their discipline. If someone who does something which is betweeen disciplines X and Y, some members of the committe of department X will say, "They may be interesting, but they are not Xists. They haven't shown a good grasp of our field, either its methods or its results". And the Y people will say the same thing, with Y substituted for X.
so if we want interdisciplinary work, we need to give people a way to get hired and promoted (including tenure) even if they are not good enough in any particular discipline to meet its standards
The first conception is the one that most makes sense with other meanings of the word. Discipline is a choice of a set of things you DON'T do (or at least, you don't do them when producing the sort of result that is held to have the most value). Mathematicians don't say that are contingently true. Scientists don't assert things without evidence. In this conception, a discipline is a litmus test, by which a set of methodologies can be distinguished.
The second conception is a set of concepts and results. To give arbitrary examples that are not meant to be to take a position on whether the concepts in the examples are central, biologists understand the theory of evolution. Neurobiologists know how sodium and potassium ion channels interact in the Hodgkin-Huxley model. Economists know how supply and demand interact to set price in a free market, and how the situation of a monopoly affects this. Philosophers know something about the concepts of realism and idealism and the arguments for each.
The third conception is a community. There is a group of people who consider themselves biologists, and a larger community that works with them. And the same for the other disciplines.
Using the first conception, interdisciplinary means taking the liberty to throw off the restraits of any given discipline. So, let's do something that is neither mathematics nor physics; we'll spend our time thinking about a bunch of formulas whose variables represent physical quantities; but we cannot prove these formulas and which we also don't have any experimental evidence for them. This sort of thing is sometimes valuable, but its value is often questionable.
Using the second conception, interdisciplinary means people whose knowledge is broader at the expense of some depth; for example, they may know the core concepts and results of two disciplines, but not be so up to date on current work in either one of them, although perhaps they are up to date on a body of work which is built upon both of the two disciplines. This is clearly valuable.
Using the third conception, interdisciplinary means people who bridge two or more communities of scholars. This is clearly valuable.
Arguments against interdisciplinary, in the first sense, are all well and good. However, i am speaking here about the value of scholars who are interdisciplinary in the second and third sense.
in many large information organization structures, we see that there is more information in the combinatorial overlaps between things than in the "core things". E.g. in the brain there is more association cortex than primary sensory and motor cortex. One weak argument for this is that there are N^2 possible pairs of N elements, and n^2 > n (for n > 1).
i opine that the majority of professors should be interdisciplinary. so, hiring and promoting professors within departments should be the exception rather than the rule. By no means do i think departments should be abolished. I think that, perhaps, 1/3 of tenured professors should have received tenure from a department (note: any constant proportion cannot keep up with n^2 scaling).
i don't know. i think, for now, every university should have its own system, to provide diversity. Some ideas:
