When I spend a whole day talking enthusiastically about mathematics, people come to the unfortunate conclusion that I enjoy mathematics. They would be closer to the mark if they said also that I don't enjoy mathematics purely for the sake of mathematics.
You can extend this to other fields like phonology, linguistics, logic, languages, computer science, philosophy, poetry, metaphysics, and epistemology. There is a definite sense in which I don't like or enjoy any of these fields.
The problem is this. Though I might spend all day chatting about mathematics, I would only do so to settle an obscure point in philosophy. Even when I explain this, it makes me look like I enjoy philosophy, whereas I might only have got to this point in philosophy because of a certain obscure thing in a book I might have been reading about ethics, say.
So you have a series of connections, almost like resolving a dependency chain, and when you trace it back to what started me getting into it, you'll find that the questions that get me going in the first place on such forays are in the cracks between disciplines.
This is not to say that I don't enjoy products of certain disciplines. What I'm talking about are academic disciplines: the pigeonholing of supposed interests. So I enjoy reading a few poems, yet I don't enjoy talking about poetry. What this means is that if a particular poem strikes me as interesting for some reason, I will try to trace what that reason is. It might get me started on æsthetics, say, and then I might switch to cognitive science, or to the history of the author of the poem, and so on.
You wouldn't, really, in this case say that I'm talking about poetry. It would be æsthetics, or cognitive science, or history. Yet I might also start talking about rhythm and metre and critical theory, and that would be regarded as poetics, as talking about poetry. Yet it would be orthogonal to the reason why I started researching my particular point. It is just as valid, to me, to consider a poem historically as it is poetically, as long as it answers the kind of question that I set out with!
So what I call “interesting” is always in relation to a structure, there is almost nothing which I would say, amongst academic disciplines, is inherently interesting. There may be a few exceptions to this, but I haven't worked out the details yet. You would basically have to make a class of all of the cracks between the disciplines that I allude to, but perhaps the cracks aren't conducive to classification, otherwise they wouldn't be cracks in the first place.
by Sean B. Palmer