Joachim,

You asked for my theoretical perspective on pointing-gestures and pictures as means of communicating and teaching domain-specific concepts. Like Velina, I interpret these terms far more generically than their specific, literal meanings.

My theoretical perspective is grounded in my experience as a professional pianist and piano-teacher.

First, with regard to "pictures" - or more generically, deliberately fashioned perceptual imagery that is suggestive of a certain concept.

• The teaching of instrumental technique is fundamentally reliant upon visual demonstrating of playing actions, providing concrete models for learners to imitate and thereafter apply generally in practice. (Many teachers, however, go to extraordinary lengths to describe playing actions verbally, often referring to non-visible concepts, e.g. descriptions of skeletal and muscular anatomy, laws of motion and leverage, kinaesthetic sensations and what-not - the theoretical import of which is not likely to be immediately translatable into actions by naive learners as teachers intend.) It's worth noting that traditional instruction in ballet and other formalized dance is entirely reliant on visual modelling.
• At conservatoire level, teaching is conducted principally on a basis of auditory modelling, i.e., on having students imitate the exact sounds performed by the teacher - for the greater part without specifically demonstrating the actions involved. Students at this level of high technical proficiency are mostly able to interpret the sounds in terms of required actions, and are also able to infer (largely non-consciously) minutely detailed motorically related information from observing the teacher's actions while listening to them demonstrate auditory models.

As regards "pointing-gestures", the deliberately fashioned gestures of an orchestral conductor can be regarded as an extreme case of suggestive concept-communicating, on a par with formal sign-languages, but allowing possibilities for novel, generative improvisatory gesturing. Watch, for example, videos of Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler (particularly in rehearsal). Experienced ensemble players also communicate immediate intentions and requests by various gestural means.

Hi Luis,

In my view the following steps are useful as a start:

1. Avoid jargon and be specific.

2. Describe your point and use examples.

3. Check that you understand each other.

Kind regards,

Anne

Would a common interdisciplinary language actually be beneficial? Presuppositions that it would need to be wisely considered in terms of logical cogency and the necessary conditions for interdisciplinarity per se. I argue, as follows, that it would undermine, rather than promote the growth of knowledge.

On the one hand, human language is grounded and developed in ways that reflect and productively serve the communicating of concepts most centrally important to particular human communities. Language is a general faculty evolved on the basis of its effectiveness within each community, thereby becoming adaptively specialized and consequently diversified.

On the other hand, Interdisciplinarity denotes not a tool serving communication in adaptive ways, but a collective process, referring to an abstract, holistic concept of collective endeavour - the consequence of intercommunicating. In concrete, causal terms, it comes into being by way of efforts to improve discourse between multiple disciplines that have come to recognize the usefulness of other disciplines for pursuing their own specializations. Multidisciplinarity is the empowering, ontogenic basis for interdisciplinarity and what gets cross-fertilized, and without diverse, multidisciplinary pursuit, interdisciplinarity cannot exist.

Interdisciplinarity continues to demonstrate the fecundity of conceptual cross-fertilization that, as it is, has necessarily been nurtured within different communities with their own pursuits, concepts and languages. The ostensible language-barriers between those languages, with their own conceptually shaped vocabularies - whilst obviously problematic at a superficial level - has evidently not prevented the rise and growth of interdisciplinary discourse.

In concrete terms, again, the interdisciplinlary cross-fertilization process has been due to the vicarious work of individuals possessing sufficient knowledge of different specialized disciplinary concepts and terminologies to successfully translate them and so make them accessible across the disciplines concerned. Their enthusiastic taking on the role of pollinators of the flowers that have come into bloom is essential. That has always been the case throughout the history of academia, and is a recognized function of specialized journals as well as ones specifically promoting indisciplinarity.

The primary and principal barrier to interdisciplinary discourse, it is historically evident, has not been language, but ignorance within individual disciplines of the findings of other disciplines, due initially to the neccessity of their founders' gravitating around propitious geographical centres, at the time remote from those of other disciplines, and thereafter to tendencies of partisanship as regards pursuing personal and collective interests and undertaking the educating of future participants. Cross-fertilizers in the past have generally been atypical members of their discipline, polymathically inclined and having the financial resources to permit travelling to distant centres of learning. The flourishing of interdisciplinarity is a recent phenomenon that is directly attributable to technological advances permitting increasingly rapid and inexpensive access by large factions within individual disciplines to the knowledge gained by others.

To conclude, diverse languages exist to serve specific ends and are essential for attaining them, irrespectively of external influences, and means of promoting discourse of must never be considered more vital than the diverse ends that workers within particular disciplines are able to attain by virtue of the fecundity of their specialized languages. Cross-fertilization of ideas within each individual discipline is fundamental for permitting valuable, profitable discourse between disciplines. To advocate developing a homogonizing Esperanto-like language purely in the interest of realizing an interdisciplinary ideology would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater - an entirely Quixotic venture with necessarily deleterious consequences for future growth.

I look forward eagerly to reading objections to these points - which in no way deprecate the importance of Anne's opening contribution. Those points refer to the task of conceptual translation, essential, as my argument stresses, for initializing interdisciplinary discourse of any shape or form.

Best regards to all!

Richard, I can only agree whith you. I had a difficult experience whith multidisciplinary language-exchanges in cognitive science. Several years we learned how to understand what the other is saying. We used picures and pointing gestures, really! But finally, if one wants to understand what happens in the other domains, she has to learn what do the main concepts mean, how are they related and how do they enter into sentences that have some meaning...

Velina, that is exactly my own experience, and no doubt of all like us who have become intellectually prompted to explore unfamiliar fields of knowledge - and especially if lacking the assistance of a translator and mentor. Even with such assistance, knowledge does not come on a plate, ready packaged. Acquiring knowledge entails learning. Learning entails effort, usually messy and muddled. There does exist a choice - to make the effort and learn, or eschew the effort and remain ignorant and uninspired - but no others. That's life!

Your personal reminiscence brings to mind two very well-known Einstein quotes, closely related in substance. First, that a theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Likewise the dictum holds for communicating the theory to novices. Educators (and interdisciplinarians) need to remember that. With all their good intentions to find ways of facilitating knowledge-communicating, they risk oversimplification. Einstein's second quip was that a truly worthy theory ought, on account of its substance's potency, to be successfully communicable to the ordinary layperson. Well, the question is, how to accomplish that without oversimplifying. I suggest the most likely means would be to use signs and gestures that humans universally use, emergent in the course of their biological evolution - just as in your cited case. For humans, there could be no more optimal and potent signallers of knowledge. Which is why visual gesturing accompanying spoken explanations is so effective, so instinctively used, and so often essential for disambiguating their content.

Now I'd really like to see you two explain your theories from your respective fields with pictures and pointing gestures!

Question for your question... Would you define interdisciplinary as two or more areas of study joined together in order to form one specific field? Or, would you define interdisciplinary as using one area of study to examine another? Perhaps a little bit of both? (For example, neuroscience is the combination of several fields and typically uses one area of study to analyze another.)

After giving this question some thought, I believe that how you define interdisciplinary dictates the process by which people may be able to communicate.

Get agreement on the common terms.

Olivia Barry: I think the second option is out of the question, as any discipline can examine a phenomenon from another discipline without crossing its boundaries. E.g. a chemical examination of biological phenomena can still be an endeavor within chemistry. So I would gravitate to the first definition ("two or more areas of study joined together in order to form one specific field"), although it seems to narrow to me: it is not necessary to form "one specific field", "one endeavor" seems to be enough (much like wikipedia defines interdisciplinarity).

Joachim, hi. Yes, pictures and pointing gestures. How? As in the primary school.

Hi Velina! But... in primary school what you try to say is usually much simpler than what we're trying to say here, so I'm wondering how/whether that could be achieved.

Joachim, what we explain to children in primary school is very, very difficult. It seems to us simple after having finished the secondary. You may try to explain something as simple as how to do the addition of natural numbers to someone in primary school.

Dear Luis Jimenez

With regard to putting or piecing findings from different disciplines together: There is only one correct way and that is to discover findings providing a concrete, TRULY-EMPIRICAL "bridge" between them, phenomenon where each of the 2 disciplines together or both have distinct empirical contributions which apply (see below for the only decent definition of empiricism, just referred to twice). This is the best one can hope for, and often that will not or cannot happen (either, perhaps for unclear reasons). But if you are "stuck" like this you may well have to get out of that morass as part of reasonably continuing -- though great discoveries can "speak for themselves"). [(More on the "positive side": sometimes, in some cases, such a "bridge" can be found in naturally occurring phenomenon/findings.)]

Just as importantly: Any "other way" of connecting the findings of different disciplines is going to be involving human intuition, in ways that are "beyond" mere reasonable, testable, verifiable hypotheses (the latter, the ONLY way human "guesses" ultimately are appropriate) and these other sorts of guesses are not only VERY likely to be incorrect but to be MAJOR dead-ends and/or distractions (maybe long-term or long-standing), and damaging to scientific progress. (I know of a field pretending to be a science that has been in such a bad situation, just described, for its entire history, and that is Psychology.)

All good [or real] progress, allowing for continuing or continuous progress, I believe involves true empiricism: where each and every construct is, at least in KEY ways, and at some time, in a way(s) (verified/agreed upon) clearly and notably founded/based/grounded in directly observable overt phenomenon -- patterns of phenomenon. ONLY such gives you the other hallmark characteristic OF good science (aka good empiricism) and that IS what was just mentioned: allowing for continuing or continuous progress (if you do not yield THAT at least your "last step" was wrong or incorrect).

Olivia Barry

Dear Olivia

Thank you for reading my question and the answer to your question would be: different fields of study in relation to a specific topic. The neurosciences is my area of research and I agree with you in relation to it

Richard Traub

Thank you for reading my question and your answer:

Your suggestions have been very useful to me.

I am a medical emergencologist and I have sought to make a parallel scientific career and sometimes achieving a common language with other areas of knowledge has been a challenging task but full of many learnings.

My best wishes

Brad Jesness

Thanks for your valuable response

In my training as a medical doctor I trained more as a user of the scientific advances and the work of scientific creation maybe they were relegated to other people (it is my personal experience does not mean that it is the same for everyone), these discussions have contributed a lot to me my research area that is neuroscience.

Thanks again for your support

Luis

Joachim Lipski

Thanks for your valuable response

It is interesting to have opinions from other scientists far from my area of work as are doctors. I greatly appreciate the time it took to read my question

I'm at your service

Luis

Velina Slavova

Thanks for your valuable response

It is interesting to have opinions from other scientists far from my area of work as are doctors. I greatly appreciate the time it took to read my question

I hope to continue counting on your opinion on other questions in the future

I'm at your service

Luis

Velina: Oh, I agree. However, then your way of saying "just as we do in primary school" seems in need of explanation, as we typically do not teach children about more complicated things simply by "pictures and pointing gestures". The addition of natural numbers seems in dire need of something "more", don't you think?

Joachim, agreed. Needs a lot of "more". Children in primary schoos. They have to relate natural numbers with quantity, so one has to train in their heads this relation when showing them different quantities, of different things, and to make them relating the quantity with the number. That is why they do so many exercices where the question is: is 6 bigger that 9? First pointing gestures such as "here we have 5 apples" and "here we have 9 apples" ... If one has never had particular knowledge about Na K and their ions, he is in the same situation concerning the action potential. He needs examples and pointing gestures to some diagram where the "This line shows how the membrane is charged during the process of ...."

I cannot understand what do you ask, really. If you have never seen an integral but you have to work with people who explain Rational thought by means of integrals, I guess they will drow a surface, point to it and say "this is what the integration means" or something like this. I dubt they will send you to read what are the sums of Darboux.

I don't know do you have an experience with such issues, but I do - from both sides. The person who makes the pointing gestures in order to explain and the person who needs pointing gestures in order to understand. When I say "pointing gestures" I mean not only and exactly pointing gestures, but something of very similar as a simple basis for quasi-intuitive explanation. This goes to our conversation what do we need to understand what is "water". We need just to be shown what it is.

I do not doubt that teaching complicated things depends on teaching simple things, and that teaching simple things can at least be supported by "pointing gestures and pictures". My original challenge was for you to explain your theories from your respective fields that way, and if you think that is possible (which I hope you'll then do on youtube!), then my joke will simply have backfired...

Joachim,

You asked for my theoretical perspective on pointing-gestures and pictures as means of communicating and teaching domain-specific concepts. Like Velina, I interpret these terms far more generically than their specific, literal meanings.

My theoretical perspective is grounded in my experience as a professional pianist and piano-teacher.

First, with regard to "pictures" - or more generically, deliberately fashioned perceptual imagery that is suggestive of a certain concept.

• The teaching of instrumental technique is fundamentally reliant upon visual demonstrating of playing actions, providing concrete models for learners to imitate and thereafter apply generally in practice. (Many teachers, however, go to extraordinary lengths to describe playing actions verbally, often referring to non-visible concepts, e.g. descriptions of skeletal and muscular anatomy, laws of motion and leverage, kinaesthetic sensations and what-not - the theoretical import of which is not likely to be immediately translatable into actions by naive learners as teachers intend.) It's worth noting that traditional instruction in ballet and other formalized dance is entirely reliant on visual modelling.
• At conservatoire level, teaching is conducted principally on a basis of auditory modelling, i.e., on having students imitate the exact sounds performed by the teacher - for the greater part without specifically demonstrating the actions involved. Students at this level of high technical proficiency are mostly able to interpret the sounds in terms of required actions, and are also able to infer (largely non-consciously) minutely detailed motorically related information from observing the teacher's actions while listening to them demonstrate auditory models.

As regards "pointing-gestures", the deliberately fashioned gestures of an orchestral conductor can be regarded as an extreme case of suggestive concept-communicating, on a par with formal sign-languages, but allowing possibilities for novel, generative improvisatory gesturing. Watch, for example, videos of Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler (particularly in rehearsal). Experienced ensemble players also communicate immediate intentions and requests by various gestural means.

Hahaha! Joachim... Yes... I think my trials to explain to the first year students in Computer Science that a computer is a machine and that it does not know what is a sin(x) function, but is programmed to perform Taylor and Maclaurin series, indeed, do deserve to be published on YouTobe. I show even a sun watch.

Richard, once I had the chance to participate as audiance to "lectures" given to yang musicians who showed to be so good that they were trained to become orchestral conductors. That was done in a big cinema hall, the lessons were given by a orchestral conductor from the Vienna philharmonic orchestra. My one-week passive participation was so wonderful as experience that will never forget even the details! Not only pointing gestures are trained, but also face expression, head position, overall posture and so on and so on. The pointing gestures are done with the entier body in fact. And they have to be small, distinguishable and clear. Some years later one of the students became the orchestral conductor of the Russe philharmonic orchestre and I went observing the result... Obviousely, I was also hearing it. The entier sound from the orcchestrum-body was as if the conductor was playing every sound by himself. Yes, impressive!

Velina and Richard,

thank you for the rich - albeit verbal - illustration of your experiences. I feel I can relate very well!

I should once again stress that I was only challenging you jokingly. Of course, even the most "dry" or non-practical subjects benefit from a teaching style which is at least supported by pictures and gestures.

Velina originally stated the following: "I had a difficult experience whith multidisciplinary language-exchanges in cognitive science. Several years we learned how to understand what the other is saying. We used picures and pointing gestures, really!" This statement simply led me to imagining that Velina, in this situation, would cease verbal communication altogether and exclusively use pictures and gestures, which I found rather amusing...

Joachim, it is amaising, agreed. Many others are doing the same. Tiring issue...

Dear Luis Jimenez

What would be the first step to create a common language for different disciplines?

Systematic, reliable observations ("agreeable"; showing very high inter-observer reliabilities): all, at least, clearly grounded or founded via some direct observation of overt phenomenon [patterns] (or some such we seek, in a principled, empirically-founded way, being empiricists).

I have for-sure relatively low regard for interdisciplinary studies BECAUSE they, at least very typically, cannot meet the above standard _AND_ there is no legitimate way (for the purposes you describe) to do that, except to ALSO here do as indicated above. This standard really applies not only to science, but to any areas of Study where there is clear, abiding motivation(s) (just about any legitimate area of study).

The "best channels" between disciplines often, and likely rarely, can be created "at this level". But, if you can do it: go for it, FOR SURE. Really, all I (and similar empiricists) say is, to put it raw-ly and simply that : ALL that is required is simply that required for good (understandable, useful) communication -- and without that you do not have much that is not just momentary. I would be willing to listen to a counter-argument for this, but doubt that there is one (at least one sufficiently agreeable and understandable). "Things" are as they are, in some Reality we hope to approach closer to together, and nothing more or less.

P.S. Please note that I have a tendency to better-edit, or add to, an essay for at least 10 minutes, and , sometimes an hour (thankfully, "going" longer than that is rare). But do be sure to read an essay I have written as an Answer more than once (the other time(s), after a time-gap).