Our current intellectual system provides us with a far more complete and accurate understanding of nature and ourselves than was available in any previous society. This gain in understanding has arisen from two sources: the use of the "scientific method," and the breaking up of our intellectual enterprise into increasingly narrower disciplines and research programs. However, we have failed to keep these narrow specialties connected to the intellectual enterprise as a whole.

The author demonstrates that this lack of connection to the overall enterprise causes a number of difficulties. We have no viewpoint from which we can understand the relationships among the various disciplines. We lack a forum for adjudicating situations where different disciplines give conflicting answers to the same problem. We seriously underestimate the differences in methodology and in the nature of principles in the various branches of science.

This provocative and wide-ranging book delineates these and other related difficulties, examines their sources in detail, and suggests solutions. The book erects three overviews of the complete intellectual terrain, creates a quantitative measure for the complexity of any system, and examines the important effects of the limitations of the human mind on scholarship.