ABSTRACT
The "fish-scale model of omniscience" represents the solution advocated, a solution kept from spontaneous emergence by the ethnocentrism of disciplines. Lying behind many models of interdisciplinary competence is an unrealistic notion of unidisciplinary competence—the image of scholars competent in one discipline. The specialties within disciplines are more coherent, and eventually such specialization takes over, each scientist allowing the congeries of irrelevancies within his own disciplinary knowledge to atrophy, journals to go unread, subscriptions to lapse, etc. Ethnocentrism of departments contributed in many ways. For example, it was not allowed that the content be shrunk to an integrated common core using a common vocabulary. Collective decisions will be achieved only by a consensus of a plurality of specialties within the department. Scholarly reading for the true scholar is ideally recreational, something he enjoys doing and would choose to do reaction ally even if he had some other profession.
