an academic discipline – branch of knowledge that is taught at all levels of education and researched typically at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined (in part), and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned societies and academic departments or faculties to which their practitioners belong. a formal science – branch of knowledge concerned with the properties of formal systems based on definitions and rules of inference. Unlike other sciences, the formal sciences are not concerned with the validity of theories based on observations in the physical world.