Disciplinarity and the Growth of Knowledge

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Abstract
I want to consider how the general characteristics of a discipline might facilitate “social mechanisms for distributing knowledge” that do not depend on uniformity of use, but, in fact, on different uses by different people. Indeed, I want to show that the ways in which a discipline is organized afford the growth of knowledge and do so, in particular, by facilitating an approach to what Thomas Kuhn described as “the essential tension” between, on the one hand, the traditional or customary elements of disciplined enquiry, which are prerequisites for there being a community of enquiry, and, on the other hand, the innovative elements of disciplined enquiry, which are needed on account of the always already inadequate character of our engagement with the objects of enquiry.

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