On the Forming of Unified Field Theories

This paper is a comment to another article appearing in the same issue of the Journal of Dispute resolution. In the main article, Ebner and his co-authors suggest that negotiation’s character as a multidisciplinary field has resulted in its wisdom remaining distributed amongst its disciplines and practices of origin, rather than coming together under a shared theoretical umbrella. They suggested how such a unified “grand” theory of negotiation might be constructed, and discuss how it would interface with practice across the wide variety of contexts in which it applies. This article can be read at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2897920 In this comment, the author notes connections between searching for such a unifying theory in the negotiation field, and the ongoing search for a theory unifying natural forces in the field of physics. The author suggests several issues the negotiation field might do well to keep in mind, after considering the comparative experiences of the two fields.