We’ll leave to others the exploration of the evolution of the “specialist,” a term that denotes a construct that presupposes inclusions and exclusions, and connotes heightened expertise within the bounded areas claimed by the specialists as their own.

We do not write on a blank slate, and our specialties (the bounded areas) present themselves, as it were, through the existing divisions that the specialists cultivate, perhaps to deepen their explorations, perhaps to exclude the uninitiated from trespassing, perhaps to blend in with fellow specialists.   The reasons multiply as we search to catalogue them, and the intentions that once propelled the colonists of the uncultivated areas to populate them with specialized knowledge are largely now recoverable only through the imaginations of the specialist known as “historian.”

As members of one, or perhaps two, specialties, we have the responsibility and the right to cross-boundaries, to re-arrange boundaries, to cross-fertilize them, and to seek to inform our perspectives with the riches of areas defined only by our individual capacities to apprehend and comprehend.

Why leave economic policy solely to the economist when the prescriptions that preliminarily follow from of their regression analyses should be informed by the historian, psychologist, anthropologist and poet?  Why leave statistics solely  to the mathematicians and statisticians when the criteria to govern selections, prioritizing and weighting should be considered by the philosopher, sociologist and artist? And why leave poems to the literature professors if the leaving leaves us unable to engage with the poems without intermediation?

Do I oversimplify? And erect straw-men? Of course. Do I advocate insurrection by the non-specialists and invasions that cross the specialist barriers? Of course. But, as with nutrition, all in moderation.