ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the nature of disciplines, which is crucial for understanding the social identification of individual scholars. It also analyzes disciplinary emotions as group-based emotions of a specific kind that are both causally and rationally tied to disciplinary identities. The chapter examines the role of different disciplinary emotions in interdisciplinary interaction, and in scientific imperialism in particular, elucidating the situations in which these emotions emerge and the kinds of behavior they motivate. It suggests that the internal justification of imperialistic disciplinary emotions as motivational forces derives from the epistemic core of the discipline that contains second-order judgments about the superiority or some other special expediency of the imperialistic discipline in relation to others. The rational justification of such disciplinary emotions – as well as those that are prompted in the target disciplines of scientific imperialism – depends on their adaptiveness in promoting epistemic progress in scientific inquiry at large.
