In this debate episode, we turn to J. Linn Mackey’s Rules Are Not the Way to Do Interdisciplinarity: A Response to Szostak. While Rick Szostak outlines a twelve-step, structured model for interdisciplinary research, Mackey pushes back, arguing that interdisciplinarity cannot be reduced to a checklist. Instead, he views it as an intuitive and often unsystematic process, better guided by creativity and flexibility than rigid rules. To illustrate his point, Mackey compares his own experience writing an interdisciplinary article to Szostak’s framework, showing that only a few of the steps applied—and mostly by coincidence. Drawing on post-positivist thinkers like Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi, he notes that even the sciences depend heavily on intuition, which means interdisciplinarity must rely on it even more. Mackey closes by suggesting a shift in focus from “integration” to “emergence” as a defining feature of interdisciplinary work, sparking an important conversation about whether rules or intuition should guide the future of interdisciplinary research.

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