The Pursuit of Academic Research Across all the Disciplines - Article Discussion


Details
We'll get together on Zoom to discuss Fred Spier's paper, "On the Pursuit of Academic Research across all the Disciplines".
https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2242/2129
When reading the article, consider the following questions.
1. Does Spier have a point in arguing that Big History calls for a common language across disciplines for clearer communication, or is it fine to maintain specialized terms in each field and as a Big Historian use such as context calls for?
2. Is Spier right in asserting that the nature of research across the disciplines is actually common, or are there fundamental differences in the nature of research between, for example, the natural sciences and the social sciences?
3. Spier seeks to find the nature of academic research that describes all academic research, not just that of one discipline or the other. Is this a useful question to be asking? Might the abstraction required to answer it make that the answer offers little new insight?
4. What are your thoughts, positive, negative or neutrally reflective, on the four fundamental requirements of academic research argued for in this paper? Are their any requirements you would add/change/remove from this list?
5. Spier argues that there are many non-rational influences in academic research. Should these non-rational elements be mitigated?
6. Spier posits that the social sciences are far more complex subjects than the hard sciences. What are the strenghts and/or weaknesses of this idea?
7. Would it be good for historians to strive for the 'detachment' manifested by practitioners of the hard sciences?
If you have any aspect of the paper you'd like to discuss or diver deeper into, let me know beforehand or bring it up during the discussion.

The Pursuit of Academic Research Across all the Disciplines - Article Discussion