This paper starts from the point in the early 1970s at which educational theory and research was temporarily structured under the ‘foundation’ disciplines of psychology, sociology, philosophy and history of education. It observes the way the intellectual resources of educational research have become enlarged and enriched and these disciplines themselves fragmented and hybridised to a degree that prompts talk not just of interdisciplinarity but of ‘postdisciplinarity’. The paper argues, however, that without discipline, in the sense of a shared language, a (...) rule governed structure of enquiry—something ‘systematic’—we lose the conditions that make a community of arguers possible. Further, we lose the basis for the special claim which research might otherwise make on our attention and on our belief. (shrink)