Why the Human Sciences Split Into Silos and How to Reunify Them

The fragmentation of the human sciences into autonomous disciplines — sociology, anthropology, history, linguistics, and so forth — is typically narrated as a contingent product of institutional history. This argument goes further: the fragmentation is a structural consequence of applying substance ontology to social phenomena. The 19th-century founders implicitly treated their objects of study as natural kinds possessing fixed essences, each fully describable within a single disciplinary frame. This ontological commitment, rarely made explicit, generated the very boundaries that later seemed natural and necessary.

Postmodern and post-structuralist critiques correctly identified these categories as historically contingent, value-laden, and constituted through exclusions. Yet the response remained largely deconstructive — a negative moment without a corresponding positive reconstruction. The proposal here is that a process social ontology supplies what deconstruction could not: if society, culture, religion, and art are reconceived not as substances but as ongoing, ecology-like interactions co-produced by human and non-human social agents, then disciplinary boundaries dissolve not into relativism but into a more empirically adequate picture of social reality.

This structural failure is compounded by an institutional feedback loop. As disciplines mature, foundational questions are treated as settled, pushing scholars toward ever-narrower specializations rewarded by hiring committees and journal gatekeepers. The specialized jargon each field develops further impedes cross-disciplinary recognition of shared problems. Yet the same system overproduces highly trained scholars who cannot be absorbed by it. This surplus workforce represents a latent resource: people who could be retrained not as disciplinary generalists but as second-order theorists capable of systematic cross-disciplinary translation — the core personnel of a genuinely integrative human science.