Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 07 – 28
It is often assumed that each academic discipline possesses its own distinct subject matter. This assumption is misleading. The boundaries separating disciplines frequently reflect differences in conceptual vocabulary, explanatory emphasis, and historical development rather than fundamentally different domains of reality. The same phenomenon may therefore be investigated simultaneously within several disciplines, each employing its own theoretical language while addressing essentially the same underlying problem. Academic disciplines should consequently be understood less as partitions of reality than as complementary conceptual frameworks through which the same reality is investigated.
The organization of modern universities illustrates this point. Sweden, for example, employs approximately 5,000–6,000 professors, yet these are distributed across fewer than 300 officially recognized research subjects according to the Swedish Standard Classification of Research Subjects (SSIF 2025). The United States employs hundreds of thousands of university faculty members, but its universities are likewise organized around only a few hundred established disciplines and subdisciplines rather than thousands of independent subjects. Scientific growth is therefore reflected primarily in the multiplication of researchers, publications, and specialized research programs within existing disciplines, while the creation of entirely new disciplines remains comparatively rare. The size of the academic community should not be confused with the number of conceptual frameworks through which knowledge is organized.
Historical evidence points in the same direction. Although more than two millennia separate Aristotle from the modern university, the number of broad domains of inquiry has probably increased by only a factor of two or three. Many disciplines continue to trace their intellectual ancestry to classical or early modern authors. Psychology looks to Aristotle’s De Anima; medicine to Hippocrates; political science to Plato and Aristotle; biology to Aristotle’s zoological works; economics to Aristotle or Adam Smith. Even before psychology became an independent discipline, Bacon discussed the idola mentis, Descartes analyzed perception and emotion, and Hume examined habit, association, and the passions. Likewise, long before sociology acquired its modern name, philosophers, historians, and political theorists investigated social organization and collective behavior. The institutional establishment of a discipline therefore usually marks the consolidation of an existing field of inquiry rather than the discovery of an entirely new subject matter.
The relationship between disciplines and their objects of study becomes even clearer when one considers a single phenomenon. Group size in living organisms, for example, may be investigated by evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, anthropology, mathematics, and computer science. Each discipline employs its own terminology and explanatory concepts, yet all investigate the same phenomenon. The differences lie primarily in the conceptual framework adopted, not in the existence of different realities. The proliferation of disciplinary terminology should therefore not be mistaken for a corresponding proliferation of phenomena. These observations suggest that the growth of knowledge occurs principally through the refinement of concepts, the accumulation of evidence, and the increasing specialization of existing disciplines rather than through the continual creation of fundamentally new subjects. New disciplines often arise by reorganizing existing knowledge, introducing new methods, or adopting new explanatory perspectives, not because previously unknown domains of reality have been discovered. The conceptual architecture of human knowledge has therefore proved remarkably stable despite the enormous expansion of the academic community built upon it.
Hossein Jorjani 