Languages and Cultures Seminar | Disciplinarity and the Growth of Knowledge: The Importance of the Department in Untethering Originality

Event Details

Date:

Friday, 11 September 2015

Time:

1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Room:

209

UQ Location:

Gordon Greenwood Building (St Lucia)

URL:

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Professor Fred D’Agostino, The University of Queensland, will present a seminar entilted 'Disciplinarity and the Growth of Knowledge: The Importance of the Department in Untethering Originality.

A discipline is doubly institutionalized, in terms of the individual departments in which it is instantiated and the research specialties that are pursued by its personnel. A department more or less unavoidably consists of a number of specialists in different subdisciplines. Work in a research specialty aims at originality, but this is often rather low-grade originality that is “tethered” to the existing template for recognizably competent contributions to the relevant research trail. Notwithstanding this sort of conservatism, real intellectual impact, establishing, rather than merely contributing to a research trail, depends on deeper forms of originality. A scholar’s departmental colleagues can play an important role in balancing these conservative influences. They typically know things that she and her peers do not (that are relevant to more original thinking in her specialty) and may disconfirm her expectations about what can be taken for granted, thereby forcing deeper thinking on her part.