Interdisciplinary Vocabulary

topic

Interdisciplinary vocabulary building is the deliberate accumulation of technical vocabulary from multiple disciplines — not to achieve the fluency of a native disciplinary speaker but to achieve the functional literacy that enables reading of primary sources, participation in interdisciplinary conversations, and the recognition of when one discipline's technical vocabulary is describing a phenomenon also addressed by a different discipline's different technical vocabulary.

Role

Interdisciplinary vocabulary is the enabling infrastructure of all other forms of interdisciplinary connection-making — because concepts can only be transferred, compared, and bridged by someone who has access to the vocabulary in which they are expressed in their home discipline. The person whose intellectual vocabulary is limited to a single discipline's technical terms can only make connections within that discipline, while the person who has deliberately built functional vocabulary in multiple fields can perceive the connections between what those fields are saying that the monolingual specialist cannot see. This is why the most productive interdisciplinary thinkers have characteristically invested in breadth of technical vocabulary rather than concentrating all vocabulary development in their primary specialty.

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