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This book is about interdisciplinarity—how scientists reach across disciplinary borders to motivate colleagues with very different intellectual and professional commitments to embark on new interdisciplinary lines of research. But interdisciplinarity is more than the subject of this book—it is its purpose as well. In this book I address scholars from my own area of research—rhetorical inquiry—as well as scientists, historians of science, and readers from various other areas of research who are interested in how new interdisciplinarity fields are formed.
This desire to speak across disciplinary borders may have something to do with my own history of interdisciplinarity. Years ago, when I was pursuing my bachelor's degree in cellular biology at the University of California at Berkeley, I took a course in the rhetoric department that set me on the path to writing this book. I was a bit skeptical about the course at first could I learn anything of value from a department whose very name stands for the amoral “empty talk” that politicians use when they skirt the real issues in public debates? A friend who recommended the course told me to look up the word rhetoric in the dictionary before passing judgment. I found two definitions: (a) mere bombast and (b) the study and/or use of effective speaking and writing. The department of rhetoric was named after the latter definition. In the first week of the course, I was shown that the discipline of rhetorical inquiry is part of an ancient tradition, with roots in Aristotle's On Rhetoric, a treatise that helps scholars develop “an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion.” It is a discipline that studies the intimate interconnection between words and thoughts: it seeks not to overcome truthful statements with tricks of language but to recognize the deep interdependence of our linguistic and nonlinguistic worlds.
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