Field Essentialism, Field Realism, Field Pragmatism

Scholarly fields – economics, physics, computer science – are the basic units for thinking about metascience. Explorations into the determinants of successful research often structure the data by academic field. Proposals to improve the rate of progress often intervene at the level of a field. The field is to science as the nation-state is to geopolitics. 

Given that fields operate as such a basic primitive for how we mentally organize science, it behooves us to ask basic philosophical questions about what fields represent. Why is it exactly that we end up with mathematics being separate from biology, both as separate departments and as distinct bodies of knowledge? Why do we end up with the specific set of fields that we have? 

One point of view takes a straightforward essentialist position. The collection of fields we have are, on some level, representative of reality itself. The study of people is simply different from the study of celestial bodies, so it is no surprise that we have fields that divide into something like sociology and something like astrophysics. In short, the set of fields that we observe in the world represent natural dividing lines in objects of exploration. The taxonomy of fields reveals something real about the world itself. 

There is merit in this point of view at the macro-level: certain ways of dividing up knowledge of the world are just natural. It also explains in part why efforts to redirect and reshape the energies of the scientific community through “field creation” often fail. You cannot define fields arbitrarily because certain things simply do not make sense to study together in a focused manner. 

But the danger of the essentialist view is that it imbues academic fields with a kind of sacred permanence. We cannot interfere in the scope of a field, or attempt to replace one field with another, because the structure of fields represents something greater than human choice or institutional decision making. 

Perhaps the greatest argument against field essentialism is the history of science itself. The boundaries between fields have always been fuzzy, and fields rise and fall over time. “Political economy” no longer exists, because political science and economics have emerged as more sharply defined fields in the 20th century. These changes don’t reflect some higher-order change in the nature of the universe, but something quite a bit closer to earth. 

This is the realist view of scholarly fields. There is nothing absolute about how researchers have divided up the universe for exploration. The fields are instead products of an intense martial combat between communities of researchers for money, minds, and prestige. 

Machine learning provides a useful illustration. At its heart, much of the core methodology of machine learning emerges from statistics. But in practice, it has emerged as a subfield of computer science. Why? The realist view is that computer science departments are more well-resourced, more prestigious, and were able to capture a commercially valuable domain as their own before fields like statistics were able to exploit the opportunity. In the land grab for resources and prominence, it was easier for machine learning to become coupled to computer science than to other potential suitors. 

This is perhaps too cynical. While the Darwinian struggle for pure power does explain some of what happens in scientific research (and certainly the university), there are good reasons to believe that most researchers are motivated by more intrinsic drivers. Strong Researchers will pursue what they want to pursue, regardless of the various incentives that are placed in their path. Realists have a story that captures some of the worst kinds of behavior, but likely miss the motivations that account for much of what researchers do. As a result, realism suggests interventions to change the trajectory of research that misunderstand the real human reasons driving that research. 

What remains is a third path, what we might call field pragmatism. At the end of the day, fields represent a specific kind of research machinery: a collection of rallying cries, norms, funders, and bureaucratic arrangements that are designed to output new insights about the world at large. Fields rise and fall on the strength of their ability to deliver knowledge and useful ideas. Researchers – particularly the good ones – coalesce around productive fields because they are also the most effective engines for pursuing the questions they want to pursue. At the end of the day, that is what matters. 

Pragmatism is in opposition to essentialism, in that fields do not represent anything sacrosanct to the pragmatist. Instead, they represent competing visions of how to explore the world: fields are not themselves bodies of knowledge so much as mechanisms for creating knowledge. The efficacy of those mechanisms can change over time. Some fields have powerful tools that are routinely able to bring new insights, other fields have ones that are only functional for periods of time. We should not hesitate to cull fields that fail to deliver, and promote ones that do. 

The pragmatist position is also in opposition to realism. Fields do useful work, and they thrive on their ability to effectuate change in our understanding of the world at large. Physics exists not simply because cabals of power-hungry academics were able to get the grant funding to go their way over decades. It exists because it maintains a phenomenally potent lens through which to analyze problems in the world. 

Field essentialism, field realism, and field pragmatism lurk behind nearly all the great debates in metascience. For instance, should we insist on doctrinaire definitions of Science, or allow for a broader scope of approaches? Essentialists versus pragmatists. Should funders intervene to deliberately blow up “monopolistic” consensus in research fields? Realists versus essentialists. And, can funders influence researcher behavior at all given the motivations that really drive most of the best work? Realists versus pragmatists. 

In Macroscience, I’ve often leaned in favor of a ruthless form of field pragmatism. But, whatever your point of view, these deeper philosophical differences will need to come into sharper focus as metascience increasingly confronts questions around the kind of science and scientists it wants to champion.