Interdisciplinarity is more than simply a call for open borders between disciplines, so that cross-disciplinary borrowings are tolerated and even appreciated for the value they add to solving problems in one's home discipline. Rather, the persistent need for interdisciplinary work highlights the inherently conventional character of disciplines. Metaphysically speaking, disciplines are nothing more than holding patterns in the dynamic of enquiry. (See science as a social movement.) Of course, disciplinary conventions can be sociohistorically explained and epistemologically justified, but so could alternatives that perhaps already exist in neighbouring countries or had existed in earlier times. Rather than dispensing with disciplines altogether, disciplinarity should be treated as a necessary evil of knowledge production: the more necessary it appears, the more evil it becomes. One important way disciplinarity can appear necessary in this objectionable sense is by an overdeterminist (or Whiggish) historical perspective that cannot imagine alternatives to the current regime of disciplines. (See historiography.)

Disciplinary success is largely a function of institutionalization. Any discipline can succeed if its members are provided with adequate resources to solve their own problems, which are in turn more generally recognized as problems worth solving. However, this commonplace continues to be shrouded in epistemological mystery because the ebb and flow of disciplines appears to happen without any central planning, let alone philosophical legislation. As a result, with a little help from secular theologies such as scientific realism, a trivial sociological insight is transubstantiated into a version of the “invisible hand” fashionable in the eighteenth century and vigorously pursued by the merchants of self-organization today, a very broad church that includes postmodernists (see postmodernism), evolutionary epistemologists and complexity theorists.