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Over the last decades, science has grown increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary and has come to depart in important ways from the classical analyses of the development of science that were developed by historically inclined philosophers of science half a century ago. In this paper, I shall provide a new account of the structure and development of contemporary science based on analyses of, first, cognitive resources and their relations to domains, and second of the distribution of cognitive resources among collaborators and (...) the epistemic dependence that this distribution implies. On this background I shall describe different ideal types of research activities and analyze how they differ. Finally, analyzing values that drive science towards different kinds of research activities, I shall sketch the main mechanisms underlying the perceived tension between disciplines andinterdisciplinarity and argue for a redefinition of accountability and quality control for interdisciplinary and collaborative science. (shrink)

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Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change is a major new book addressing one of the most challenging questions of our time. Its unique standpoint is based on the recognition that effective and coherentinterdisciplinarity is necessary to deal with the issue of climate change, and the multitude of linked phenomena which both constitute and connect to it. In the opening chapter, Roy Bhaskar makes use of the extensive resources of critical realism to articulate a comprehensive framework for multidisciplinarity,interdisciplinarity, (...) transdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinary understanding, one which duly takes account of ontological as well as epistemological considerations. Many of the subsequent chapters seek to show how this general approach can be used to make intellectual sense of the complex phenomena in and around the issue of climate change, including our response to it. Among the issues discussed, in a number of graphic and compelling studies, by a range of distinguished contributors, both activists and scholars, are: The dangers of reducing all environmental, energy and climate gas issues to questions of carbon dioxide emissions The problems of integrating natural and social scientific work and the perils of monodisciplinary tunnel vision The consequences of the neglect of issues of consumption in climate policy The desirability of a care-based ethics and of the integration of cultural considerations into climate policy The problem of relating theoretical knowledge to practical action in contemporary democratic societiesInterdisciplinarity and Climate Change is essential reading for all serious students of the fight against climate change, the interactions between governmental bodies, and critical realism. (shrink)

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We introduce a new metric forinterdisciplinarity, based on co-author publication history. A published article that has co-authors with quite different publication histories can be deemed relatively “interdisciplinary,” in that the article reflects a convergence of previous research in distinct sets of publication outlets. In recent work, we have shown that thisinterdisciplinarity metric can predict citations. Here, we show that the journal Cognitive Science tends to contain collaborations that are relatively high on thisinterdisciplinarity metric, at (...) about the 80th percentile of all journals across both social and natural sciences. Following on Goldstone and Leydesdorff, we describe how scientometric tools provide a valuable means of assessing the role of cognitive science in broader scientific work, and also as a tool to investigate teamwork and distributed cognition. We describe how data-driven metrics of this kind may facilitate this exploration without relying upon rapidly changing discipline and topic keywords associated with publications. (shrink)

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Philosophy may relate tointerdisciplinarity in two distinct ways On the one hand, philosophy may play an auxiliary role in the process ofinterdisciplinarity, typically through conceptual analysis, in the understanding that the disciplines themselves are the main epistemic players. This version of the relationship I characterise as ‘normal’ because it captures the more common pattern of the relationship, which in turn reflects an acceptance of the division of organized inquiry into disciplines. On the other hand, philosophy may (...) be itself the site for the production of interdisciplinary knowledge, understood as a kind of second-order understanding of reality that transcends the sort of knowledge that the disciplines provide, left to their own devices. This is my own position, which I dub ‘deviant’ and to which most of this article is devoted. I begin by relating the two types ofinterdisciplinarity to the organization of inquiry, especially their respective attitudes to the history of science. Underlying the two types are contrasting notions of what constitutes the ‘efficient’ pursuit of knowledge. This difference is further explored in terms of the organization of the university. The normal/deviant distinction was already marked in the institution’s medieval origins in terms of the difference between Doctors and Masters, respectively, an artefact of which remains in the postgraduate/undergraduate degree distinction. In the context of the history of the university, the prospects for deviantinterdisciplinarity were greatest from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century—the period called ‘early modern’ in the philosophy curriculum. Towards the end of that period, due to Kant and the generation of idealists who followed him, philosophy was briefly the privileged site for deviantinterdisciplinarity. After Hegel’s death, the mantle of deviantinterdisciplinarity increasingly passed to some version of ‘biology’. I explore the ‘Natur-’ and ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ versions of that post-philosophical vision, which continue to co-exist within today’s biological science. I then briefly examine the chequered reputation of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, someone who exemplified the promise and perils of deviantinterdisciplinarity over the past 200 years. I conclude with an Epilogue that considers contemporary efforts to engage philosophy in interdisciplinary work, invoking William James as an exemplar. (shrink)

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Interdisciplinarity has become a dominant research policy imperative1 – exercised by European Research Council and other funding agencies at different scales – and a substantial topic in science studies fields outside philosophy of science, including science education, research management (particularly team management) and scientometrics. Philosophers of science have only recently begun to dedicate more attention to this feature of contemporary science. The present collection of studies aspires to promote this line of philosophical inquiry in terms of case studies on (...) various aspects ofinterdisciplinarity in science, and to bring philosophical concepts and principles to bear in its analysis. While much current philosophical work has focused on the possibility of conceptual and methodological unification and integration amongst specific fields, we aim to widen the scope of philosophical treatment of this issue by mapping out the broader landscape of philosophical issues that emerge from interdisciplinary interactions, and by identifying the points where philosophical analysis can make important and relevant contributions. (shrink)

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This paper examines various ways in which philosophy of science can be interdisciplinary. It aims to provide a map of relations between philosophy and sciences, some of which are interdisciplinary. Such a map should also inform discussions concerning the question “How much philosophy is there in the philosophy of science?” In Sect. 1, we distinguish between synoptic and collaborativeinterdisciplinarity. With respect to the latter, we furthermore distinguish between two kinds of reflective forms of collaborativeinterdisciplinarity. We also (...) briefly explicate how complexity triggersinterdisciplinarity. In Sect. 2, we apply the distinctions of Sect. 1 to philosophy of science and analyze in which sense different styles of philosophy of science are interdisciplinary. The styles that we discuss are a synoptic-general, a reflective-general, a reflective-particular, a particular-embedded and a descriptive or normative style. (shrink)

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In this paper, I present a philosophical analysis of interdisciplinary scientific activities. I suggest that it is a fruitful approach to viewinterdisciplinarity in light of the recent literature on scientific representations. For this purpose I develop a meta-representational model in whichinterdisciplinarity is viewed in part as a process of integrating distinct scientific representational approaches. The analysis suggests that present methods for the evaluation of interdisciplinary projects places too much emphasis non-epistemic aspects of disciplinary integrations while more (...) or less ignoring whether specific interdisciplinary collaborations puts us in a better, or worse, epistemic position. This leads to the conclusion that there are very good reasons for recommending a more cautious, systematic, and stringent approach to the development, evaluation, and execution of interdisciplinary science. (shrink)

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En ese estudio se intenta analizar las redes de conocimiento y las acciones a ellas referidas en la escuela, cuanto a: la utilización de las nuevas tecnologías de la información y de la comunicación, que permiten repensar la escuela en su principal función; el abordaje interdisciplinar del conocimiento que presenta un dibujo heterárquico con distintos elementos no entretanto relacionados a lo largo y en profundidad, como elementos de una tela y de una grande rede; la reflexión sobre la acción en (...) la práctica pedagógica, en cuya ruptura se realiza la intervención de la tecnología y del profesor mediador. (shrink)

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Cognitive science was established as an interdisciplinary domain of research in the 1970s. Since then, the domain has flourished, despite disputes concerning itsinterdisciplinarity. Multiple methods exist for the assessment of interdisciplinary research. The present study proposes a methodology for quantifying interdisciplinary aspects of research in cognitive science. We propose models for text similarity analysis that provide helpful information about the relationship between publications and their specific research fields, showing potential as a robust measure ofinterdisciplinarity. We designed (...) and developed models utilizing the Doc2Vec method for analyzing cognitive science and related fields. Our findings reveal that cognitive science collaborates closely with most constituent disciplines. For instance, we found a balanced engagement between several constituent fields—including psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science—that contribute significantly to cognitive science. On the other hand, anthropology and neuroscience have made limited contributions. In our analysis, we find that the scholarly domain of cognitive science has been exhibiting overt interdisciplinary for the past several decades. (shrink)

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The idea that research should become more interdisciplinary has become commonplace. According to influential commentators, the unprecedented complexity of problems such as climate change or the social implications of biomedicine demand interdisciplinary efforts integrating both the social and natural sciences. In this context, the question of whether a given knowledge practice is too disciplinary, or interdisciplinary, or not disciplinary enough has become an issue for governments, research policy makers and funding agencies.Interdisciplinarity, in short, has emerged as a key (...) political preoccupation; yet the term tends to obscure as much as illuminate the diverse practices gathered under its rubric. This volume offers a new approach to theorisinginterdisciplinarity, showing how the boundaries between the social and natural sciences are being reconfigured. It examines the current preoccupation withinterdisciplinarity, notably the ascendance of a particular discourse in which it is associated with a transformation in the relations between science, technology and society. Contributors address attempts to promote collaboration between, on the one hand, the natural sciences and engineering and, on the other, the social sciences, arts and humanities. From ethnography in the IT industry to science and technology studies, environmental science to medical humanities, cybernetics to art-science, the collection interrogates howinterdisciplinarity has come to be seen as a solution not only to enhancing relations between science and society, but the pursuit of accountability and the need to foster innovation.Interdisciplinarity is essential reading for scholars, students and policy makers across the social sciences, arts and humanities, including anthropology, geography, sociology, science and technology studies and cultural studies, as well as all those engaged in interdisciplinary research. It will have particular relevance for those concerned with the knowledge economy, science policy, environmental politics, applied anthropology, ELSI research, medical humanities, and art-science. (shrink)

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Traditionally,interdisciplinarity has been taken to require conceptual or theoretical integration. However, in the emerging field of sustainability science this kind of integration is often lacking. Indeed sometimes it is regarded as an obstacle tointerdisciplinarity. Drawing on examples from sustainability science, we show that problem-feeding, i.e. the transfer of problems, is a common and fruitful-looking way of connecting disparate disciplines and establishinginterdisciplinarity. We identify two species of problem-feeding: unilateral and bilateral. Which of these is at (...) issue depends on whether solutions to the problem are fed back to the discipline in which the problem originated. We suggest that there is an interesting difference between the problem-feeding approach tointerdisciplinarity and the traditional integrative perspective suggested by among others Erich Jantsch and his colleagues. Theinterdisciplinarity resulting from problem-feeding between researchers can be local and temporary and does not require collaboration between proximate disciplines. By contrast, to make good sense of traditional integrativeinterdisciplinarity we must arguably associate it with a longer-term, global form of close, interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

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In this paper we take a close look at current interdisciplinary modeling practices in the environmental sciences, and suggest that closer attention needs to be paid to the nature of scientific practices when investigating and planninginterdisciplinarity. Whileinterdisciplinarity is often portrayed as a medium of novel and transformative methodological work, current modeling strategies in the environmental sciences are conservative, avoiding methodological conflict, while confining interdisciplinary interactions to a relatively small set of pre-existing modeling frameworks and strategies (a (...) process we call crystallization). We argue that such practices can be rationalized as responses in part to cognitive constraints which restrict interdisciplinary work. We identify four salient integrative modeling strategies in environmental sciences, and argue that this crystallization, while contradicting somewhat the novel goals many have forinterdisciplinarity, makes sense when considered in the light of common disciplinary practices and cognitive constraints. These results provide cause to rethink in more concrete methodological terms whatinterdisciplinarity amounts to, and what kinds ofinterdisciplinarity are obtainable in the environmental sciences and elsewhere. (shrink)

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The ideas ofinterdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity have been widely applied to the relationship between sciences. This article is an attempt to discuss the reasons why scientificinterdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity pose specific problems. First of all, certain questions about terminology are taken into account in order to clarify the meaning of the word ?discipline? and its cognates. Secondly, we argue that the specificity of sciences does not lie in becoming disciplines. Then, we focus on the relationship between sciences, and (...) between sciences and technologies: we argue that multidisciplinarity andinterdisciplinarity are a common practice among strict sciences and technologies. Finally, we discuss the different meanings of transdisciplinarity when it is applied to sciences. (shrink)

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This article traces the history ofinterdisciplinarity as a contemporary form of thought and of producing knowledge in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1955 to 1975. It establishes that concepts of interdisciplinary research and teaching circulated in diverse fields of knowledge and modes of articulation, and evaluates the transformations thatinterdisciplinarity underwent along the way. After detailing the process by which the adjective “interdisciplinary” first came into usage in scientific publications in the late 1950s, this article discusses (...) how interdisciplinary research and teaching began to feature in debates about university reforms and the founding of new universities in the 1960s. The article then draws on the examples of Bochum, Konstanz, and Bielefeld to illustrate how debates about disciplinary specialization and interdisciplinary connections unfolded in visual modes of expression such as diagrams or sketches. In a last step, the article examines how visual and textual reflections connectedinterdisciplinarity to the architecture of envisioned universities, and hence related this time-specific form of thought and knowledge production to the material environments of future research and teaching. (shrink)

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Science,interdisciplinarity, and the society Content Type Journal Article Pages 221-223 DOI 10.1007/s10202-011-0092-z Authors Stephan Lingner, Europa¨ische Akademie zur Erforschung von Folgen wissenschaftlich-technischer Entwicklungen Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler GmbH, Wilhelmstr. 56, 53474 Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany Journal Poiesis & Praxis: International Journal of Technology Assessment and Ethics of Science Online ISSN 1615-6617 Print ISSN 1615-6609 Journal Volume Volume 7 Journal Issue Volume 7, Number 4.

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In addition to novelty and relevance,interdisciplinarity seems to be an imperative predicate in the scientific works carried out in Indonesia. Unfortunately, research on theinterdisciplinarity itself, particularly from the perspective of philosophy of science, either descriptive or normative, i.e., what and how interdisciplinary has been (and should be) done is still a desideratum. Through database and normative-philosophical analysis, this article shows that most of the interdisciplinary works hitherto carried out are either additive or interpretative/take-over in nature. Such (...) works would be bad scientific practices. Good interdisciplinary works presuppose the existence of interdisciplinary material objects and their formal ones. These normative requirements, however, lead to a dilemma which should be faced by those who work interdisciplinarily. (shrink)

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Contemporary interdisciplinary research is often described as bringing some important changes in the structure and aims of the scientific enterprise. Sometimes, it is even characterized as a sort of Kuhnian scientific revolution. In this paper, the analogy betweeninterdisciplinarity and scientific revolutions will be analysed. It will be suggested that the way in whichinterdisciplinarity is promoted looks similar to how new paradigms were described and defended in some episodes of revolutionary scientific change. However, contrary to what happens (...) during some scientific revolutions, the rhetoric with whichinterdisciplinarity is promoted does not seem to be accompanied by a strong agreement about whatinterdisciplinarity actually is. In the end, contemporaryinterdisciplinarity could be defined as being in a ‘pre-paradigmatic’ phase, with the very talk promotinginterdisciplinarity being a possible obstacle to its maturity. (shrink)

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Este trabalho apresenta a experiência de uma abordagem interdisciplinar, desenvolvida na modalidade de pesquisa-ação, no atendimento ambulatorial a um grupo de 20 pacientes em tratamento da hepatite C. As especialidades envolvidas no projeto foram: assistência social, enfermagem, gastroenterologia, ..

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Interdisciplinarity has been a key term in the ecological debate ever since its advent in the early 1960s. The paper addresses these historical links and how the two terms ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘ecology’ have influenced each other. The later concept ‘sustainable development’ is also truly interdisciplinary, including physical, biological, socio-economic and cultural, as well as normative, mechanisms, contexts and effects operating at scales ranging from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Policies to promote sustainable development need to be based on the (...) type of interdisciplinary thinking that has been advocated for several decades within the ecological debate. This applies not least to research into the sustainability aspects of urban development, the case discussed in this paper. Despite longstanding requests forinterdisciplinarity, the development within the academic world has proceeded in the opposite direction. Many of the most influential metatheoretical perspectives virtually prohibit, or at best strongly discourage, the inclusion of insights about certain parts of reality. Here, critical realism could play a very important role as an underlabourer ofinterdisciplinarity. (shrink)

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Incommensurability may be regarded as driving specialisation, on the one hand, and as posing some problems tointerdisciplinarity, on the other hand. It may be argued, however, that incommensurability plays no role in either specialisation orinterdisciplinarity. Scientific specialties could be defined as simply 'different' (that is, about different things), rather than 'incommensurable' (that is, competing for the explanation of the same phenomena).Interdisciplinarity could be viewed as the co- ordinated effort of scientists possessing complemetary and interlocking (...) skills, and not as the overcoming of some sort of incommensurable divide. This article provides a comprehensive evaluative examination of the relations between specialisation,interdisciplinarity, and incommensurability. Its aim is to defend the relevance of incommensurability to both specialisation andinterdisciplinarity. At the same time, it aims at correcting the tendency, common among many philosophers, to regard incommensurability in a restrictive manner - such as, for example, as an almost purely semantic issue. (shrink)

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Interdisciplinarity is a notoriously difficult concept to define, and even harder to achieve in practice. All too often social approaches reduce science to an object of study, or conversely physical science approaches are invoked as a source of 'higher' truth. Drawing upon our experiences as ESRC-NERC PhD students within geography, we outline a paratactical approach that links disciplines by adjacency rather than hierarchy. Toppling the disciplinary hierarchy creates the potential for non-reductionistic dialogue between science and social science, but it (...) also raises a series of practical difficulties. These are considered around the themes of polyvocality, breadth over depth and (im)permanence. We suggest that while this kind of approach is increasingly encouraged by research funding bodies, it is less easily sustained within the everyday mechanics of the academic world. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

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Interdisciplinarity is widely promulgated as beneficial to science and society. However, there are three quite serious problems which can limit the success of any interdisciplinary research collaboration. The first problem is expertise (it takes years of effort to cultivate a deep knowledge of even one discipline). The second problem is comprehensibility (experts in different disciplines do not reliably understand each other). The third problem is service (in a given interdisciplinary endeavour, it often occurs that one discipline benefits and the (...) other discipline does not benefit). This essay is an elaboration of these three problems. Parallels are drawn between translation between languages and translation between disciplines. (shrink)

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Two fundamentally different perspectives on knowledge diffusion dominate debates about academic disciplines. On the one hand, critics of disciplinary research and education have argued that disciplines are isolated silos, within which specialists pursue inward-looking and increasingly narrow research agendas. On the other hand, critics of the silo argument have demonstrated that researchers constantly import and export ideas across disciplinary boundaries. These perspectives have different implications for how knowledge diffuses, how intellectuals gain and lose status within their disciplines, and how intellectual (...) reputations evolve within and across disciplines. We argue that highly general claims about the nature of disciplinary boundaries are counterproductive, and that research on the nature of specific disciplinary boundaries is more useful. To that end, this paper uses a novel publication and citation network dataset and statistical models of citation networks to test hypotheses about the boundaries between philosophy of science and 11 disciplinary clusters. Specifically, we test hypotheses about whether engaging with and being cited by scientific communities outside philosophy of science has an impact on one’s position within philosophy of science. Our results suggest that philosophers of science produce interdisciplinary scholarship, but they tend not to cite work by other philosophers when it is published in journals outside of their discipline. Furthermore, net of other factors, receiving citations from other disciplines has no meaningful impact—positive or negative—on citations within philosophy of science. We conclude by considering this evidence for simultaneousinterdisciplinarity and insularity in terms of scientific trading theory and other work on disciplinary boundaries and communication. (shrink)

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: This paper discusses the American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce's (1839–1914) classification of the sciences from the contemporary perspective of interdisciplinary studies. Three theses are defended: (1) Studies oninterdisciplinarity pertain to the intermediate class of Peirce's classification of all science, the sciences of review (retrospective science), ranking below the sciences of discovery (heuretic sciences) and above practical science (the arts). (2) Scientific research methods adopted by interdisciplinary inquiries are cross-categorial. Making them converge to an increasing extent (...) with the sciences of discovery, especially the methodeutic of normative logic, is one of the future challenges for studies oninterdisciplinarity. (3) The overall structure of Peirce's classification, were it to be applied in today's situation, would not, in any major respect, be radically different from what it was designed to reflect a hundred years ago, in spite of the virtually exponential creation and production of new domains and the massive increase in investment in research and scientific publication. Accordingly, charges that the sciences of discovery are becoming ever more fragmented are not new. (shrink)

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This paper considers the question: In what ways can artificial intelligence assist with interdisciplinary research for addressing complex societal problems and advancing the social good? Problems such as environmental protection, public health, and emerging technology governance do not fit neatly within traditional academic disciplines and therefore require an interdisciplinary approach. However, interdisciplinary research poses large cognitive challenges for human researchers that go beyond the substantial challenges of narrow disciplinary research. The challenges include epistemic divides between disciplines, the massive bodies of (...) relevant literature, the peer review of work that integrates an eclectic mix of topics, and the transfer of interdisciplinary research insights from one problem to another. Artificialinterdisciplinarity already helps with these challenges via search engines, recommendation engines, and automated content analysis. Future “strong artificialinterdisciplinarity” based on human-level artificial general intelligence could excel at interdisciplinary research, but it may take a long time to develop and could pose major safety and ethical issues. Therefore, there is an important role for intermediate-term artificialinterdisciplinarity systems that could make major contributions to addressing societal problems without the concerns associated with artificial general intelligence. (shrink)

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Bridging disciplines have much to teach us about how to combine analytical tools to tackle problems and questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. This article uses examples from the older bridging disciplines of geography and anthropology in order to consider what the relatively young undertaking labeled “interdisciplinary studies” can learn from their long existence. It explains what is meant by the fallacy of nomothetic claim and considers the fruitful production of answers and solutions by viewing process (methodology) not domain (academic (...) turf), as the key to interdisciplinary success. Staking claim tointerdisciplinarity is shown to be unproductive while finding the need for interdisciplinary approaches and following the mandates of that need in the pursuit of solutions to problems and questions strengthens both the disciplines and the development of interdisciplinary studies. (shrink)

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Despite the continuous emphasis on globalization, we witness increasing divisions and divisiveness in all domains of human activities. One of the reasons, if not the main one, is the intellectual fragmentation of humanity, compared in the title to the failed attempt at building the Biblical Tower of Babel. The attempts to reintegrate worldview, fragmented by the specialization of education (C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures) and expected to be achieved through reforms in curricula at all levels of education, were based on (...) the assumption that the design of a curriculum should focus on the wide distribution of subjects of study, as if the distribution was the goal. The key point is not the distribution of themes, but the development of skills in the integration of knowledge. The quantitative assessment of the width of knowledge by the number of disciplines is of secondary importance. We cannot expect the miracle that students without any intellectual tools developed for this purpose would perform the job of integration, which their teachers do not promote or demonstrate, and which they cannot achieve for themselves. There are many other reasons for the increasing interest in making inquiries interdisciplinary, but there is little progress in the methodology of the integration of knowledge. This paper is a study of the transition from multidisciplinarity tointerdisciplinarity, and further, to transdisciplinarity, with some suggestions regarding the use of methodological tools of structuralism and the choice of a conceptual framework. (shrink)

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Two major science policy issues are the integration of knowledge across academic disciplines and the accountability of science to society. Instead of adding new or external criteria for research evaluation, I argue, these goals can be pursued by subjecting disciplinary priorities and procedures to broader scrutiny from the rest of academia. From a social epistemological perspective, the paper discussesinterdisciplinarity as a mode of epistemic accountability across disciplinary boundaries, which promises to make academia more than the sum of its (...) disciplinary parts. Drawing on discussions ofinterdisciplinarity and accountability in knowledge production, as well as on empirical findings of the evaluation of research proposals, the paper unpacks the notion of academic accountability into three dimensions—the recipients, contents, and practices of accountability—and illustrates the differenceinterdisciplinarity makes in each dimension. The analysis shows thatinterdisciplinarity is not simply a category of.. (shrink)

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Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 634-645, July 2022.

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Despite its vigor, agrifood studies research faces two fault lines: the durability of disciplines, and challenges in engaging non-academic stakeholders. In this essay, I use the concept of boundary work from social studies of science and technology to reflect on the challenges and opportunities for more engaged interdisciplinary research in agrifood studies. I draw on recent field visits to several “sustainable food chain” research projects funded through the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (RELU), an innovative interdisciplinary research initiative of (...) the UK Research Councils, to highlight the contradictory nature of boundary work in interdisciplinary research. Involving efforts both to bridge interfaces and to separate, exclude and manage other disciplines or stakeholders, boundary work is inherent tointerdisciplinarity. Innovations in the organizational culture of projects and in the larger structural context for research can multiply the more generative potential of boundary work, and also yield more and better interdisciplinary research in agrifood studies. (shrink)

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In this paper I argue for the superiority of a critical realist understanding ofinterdisciplinarity over a mainstream understanding of it. I begin by exploring the reasons for the failure of mainstream researchers to achieveinterdisciplinarity. My main argument is that mainstream interdisciplinary researchers tend to hypostatize facts, fetishize constant conjunctions of events and apply to open systems an epistemology designed for closed systems. I also explain how mainstreaminterdisciplinarity supports oppression and gross inequality. I argue that (...) mainstreaminterdisciplinarity is not trueinterdisciplinarity and refer to it accordingly as ‘condisciplinarity’. By way of example, I examine the condisciplinarity of the World Health Organization’s ecological model applied to the issue of men’s violence against women. Specifically, I argue that critical realistinterdisciplinarity is preferable because it acknowledges inter alia the empirical, actual and real layers of reality, which allows it to develop depth-explanations of phenomena. In practice, this means that critical realistinterdisciplinarity can potentially provide explanations that, compared to condisciplinarity, are broader (include more of the human and non-human context) and deeper (include for example individuals’ conscious and unconscious psychological motivations). In the World Health Organization’s example of the causes of men’s violence against women, condisciplinarity resulted in the absence of historical, global and unconscious aspects of the problem. It is also restricted the analysis to reductive, constant-conjunction based theories of the causes of the problem, specifically ‘risk factors’, thereby providing a relatively shallow explanation for the problem. (shrink)

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El Diccionario Interdisciplinar Austral (DIA) es una herramienta en español de alta calidad académica de apoyo a la enseñanza y al servicio de futuras investigaciones. -/- Las voces de DIA ofrecen un actualizado estado de la cuestión, con las correspondientes referencias bibliográficas, de los principales temas que involucran relaciones interdisciplinares entre las ciencias, la filosofía y/o la teología.

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This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Setting itself against standard accounts of interdisciplinary 'integration,' and rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines. RethinkingInterdisciplinarity does not merely advocate interdisciplinary research, but attends to the hitherto tacit pragmatics, affects, power dynamics, and spatial logics in which that research is enfolded. Understanding the complex relationships between brains, minds, and environments requires (...) a delicate, playful and genuinely experimentalinterdisciplinarity, and this book shows us how it can be done. This book is open access under a CC-BY license and funded by The Wellcome Trust. (shrink)

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This paper sketches a historical account ofinterdisciplinarity. A central claim advanced is that the modern array of scientific and humanistic disciplines andinterdisciplinarity emerged together; both are moving targets, which must therefore be studied historically in relation to one another as institutionalized practices. A second claim is that of a steadily increasing complexity; new fields emerged on the boundaries of existing disciplines beginning in the late nineteenth century, followed by multi- and transdisciplinary initiatives in the twentieth, and (...) finally transdisciplinary programmatic research in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The latter two phases in this development have been driven primarily by funding agencies seeking to move the sciences in particular directions deemed socially or politically desirable (in dictatorships as well as democracies), while the existing disciplines remained in place and new ones came into being. Such policy initiatives have transformed both disciplinarity andinterdisciplinarity in unanticipated ways. The question whether multi- or transdisciplinary arrangements produce epistemically better science or scholarship appears not to have been raised, let alone examined, by the policy actors driving their creation. (shrink)

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Whileinterdisciplinarity is not a new concept, the political and discursive mobilisation ofinterdisciplinarity is. Since the 1990s, this movement has intensified, and this has affected central funding bodies so thatinterdisciplinarity is now a de facto requirement in successful grant application. As a result, the literature is ripe with definitions, taxonomies, discussions and other attempts to grasp and define the concept ofinterdisciplinarity. In this paper, we explore how strategic demands forinterdisciplinarity meet, interact (...) with and change local research practices and results of higher education and research. Our aim is to question and trace the consequences of applying the slippery and difficult terminterdisciplinarity in research. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish interdisciplinary research programme, where we observed and analysed practices of writing, publishing, collaboration and educational development in five different research projects. We show how the call forinterdisciplinarity was mobilised in a way that rendered the incentives and motives behind the programme unclear. Furthermore, we argue that the absence of clear definitions and assessment criteria produced a dominant, all-inclusive, but vague, configuration ofinterdisciplinarity that affected the research outcome, and ultimately, promoted and reproduced the existing monodisciplinary research and power structures. (shrink)

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This editorial introduction reviews the notions of disciplinarity andinterdisciplinarity and their implications for an understanding of educational studies. It examines differences between multidisciplinarity andinterdisciplinarity, also raising issues about boundary work around and across the disciplines. It discusses the question of whether education is a discipline, together with the role of the so-called ‘foundation disciplines’ of psychology, sociology, history and philosophy in underpinning educational studies.

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This article describes and defends the interdisciplinary model of the Liberal Arts degree,1 set up at the Crichton Campus of the University of Glasgow in 1998.2 It describes the structure of this Scottish undergraduate MA, placing it within the wider context of contemporary debates concerning education, but does so in order to clarify and promote a particular view ofinterdisciplinarity: namely integratedinterdisciplinarity.3 In doing so this paper aims to show both the role of philosophy in constituting a (...) significant element of the content of the courses and, more importantly, its role in framing the structure that allows fruitful interaction between the disciplines. Overtly philosophical issues provide a set of themes and questions by which to structure potentially disparate courses from separate disciplines and assist them in interacting. Philosophy thus plays a vital role in integrating interdisciplinary study, especially within a contemporary liberal arts degree, yet this is a function that is often overlooked when documenting the merits of this academic specialism. (shrink)

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This themed issue of Journal of Critical Realism has a focus oninterdisciplinarity, health and well-being.1 Specifically, the articles address topics such as homelessness, obesity (Kana...

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Between the zone of certainty beyond all doubt and the zone of incomprehensible uncertainty, the sources of which are nothing but chance, we need to use solid results from a vastinterdisciplinarity. We wish to give here a sense of the factors in play and the state of the debate and advance in the territory of howinterdisciplinarity may help to solve problems which are common in many areas of knowledge. Chaos and complexity certainly put limits on what (...) we can know. High complexity, asymmetry and/or non-linearity are universal types of imprecision. Can hazard have purpose and direction?The idea is that the more effort we put into project design to cover as many details and possible consequences as possible we can grasp in our in-depth analysis aiming to create the project (in art or science or society), the greater the chances that the random occurrence of the unpredictable event will settle on the project's purpose and direction and not on contrary to them. There is no vicious circle here. This kind of method can explain many good results already obtained in such circumstances. Simplicity, beauty, rationalistic optimism, are features of unshakeable scientific results We may call this feature of scientific theory or art _uniqueness. _Uniqueness is strongly correlated with _essentialization. _Science is working in that sense: to simplify a phenomenon to its essence in order to study it easily without losing anything important in the analysis. That is _essentialization. _Why and how complex systems move to the edge of chaos? And what do they do to stay there? They are in constant struggle to create or keep order in complexity. That is the pattern of self-organization, the specific feature of human nature. That is why our action is meant to build resilience to deal better with unpredictable events and prevent the emergence of a critical threshold. Uncertainty, indeterminacy, randomness, and contradictions appear, not as non-essential substances of debate to be eliminated by explanation, but as everlasting ingredients of our conception of reality. There are compelling reasons to believe that it is impossible to make accurate, nontrivial predictions concerning human behavior. Logic and reason are and remain priority, but unpredictability forces us to imagination and creative thinking. Indeed we are confronted with a new human landscape. The anomalies become the new normal. (shrink)

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This article offers a comparative examination of the status of ‘interdisciplinarity’, ‘cultural studies’ and ‘queer’ in the discipline of French studies in the Anglophone world and in France. It is argued that, while the intellectual origins of bothinterdisciplinarity and queer theory are French, a series of disavowals and appropriations has de-gallicized them. On the one hand, the cultural hegemony of English studies in the USA and the UK has led to a colonization and anglicization of continental thought. (...) On the other, the resistance to cultural studies within the Hexagone has meant that work done in critical sexuality studies within the Anglo-American world over the past forty years is only now beginning to be felt within French-speaking contexts. In tracing this double history of dislocation, the article contextualizes the difficulty of thinking queer in properly French terms — and the importance of doing so. (shrink)

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The article’s aim is to analyse the ontological and methodological aspects of theinterdisciplinarity problem in the context of contemporary research into the mind. After a brief presentation of the differences in meaning in the use of the terms: “multi-,” “inter-,” and “transdisciplinaryity,” the case of cognitive sicence is discussed. According to the author, the levels of analysis and explanation inmulti(inter)disciplinary science of the mind correspond to different levels or dimensions of its architecture. One of the main ontological issues (...) arising here concerns the nature of interlevel relationships constituting the hierarchical structure of the cognitive system. The article’s last part is devoted to showing that an integrated ontology of mind (consistent with scientific knowledge) must be transdisciplinary in character and based on emergentist assumptions. (shrink)

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: The main contribution of this paper to current philosophical and sociological studies on modeling is to analyze modeling as an object-oriented interdisciplinary activity and thus to bring new insights into the wide, heterogeneous discourse on tools, forms and organization of interdisciplinary research. A detailed analysis ofinterdisciplinarity in the making of models is presented, focusing on long-standing interdisciplinary collaboration between specialists in infectious diseases, mathematicians and computer scientists. The analysis introduces a novel way of studying the elements of (...) the models as carriers ofinterdisciplinarity. These elements, being functionally interdependent building blocks, evolve during the modeling work and carry the disciplinary tensions in the process. This shows how the long and challenging process of defining and reformulating the object of research is crucial for understanding the dynamics ofinterdisciplinarity in the making. (shrink)

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Acknowledgments THROUGHOUT this book I cite the many people who have provided information on individual programs and activities. ...

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Etudes sur la philosophie, la théorie politique et la littérature des Lumières en Europe, sur le thème de la reconnaissance dans le roman et le théâtre français du XVIIIe siècle, etc.

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BeyondInterdisciplinarity examines the broadening meaning of core concept across academic disciplines and other forms of knowledge. In this book, Associate Editor of The Oxford Handbook ofInterdisciplinarity and internationally recognized scholar Julie Thompson Klein depicts the heterogeneity and boundary work of inter- and trans-disciplinarity in a conceptual framework based on an ecology of spatializing practices in transaction spaces, including trading zones and communities of practice. The book includes both "crossdisciplinary" work (encompassing multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary forms) as (...) well as "cross-sector" work (spanning disciplines, fields, professions, government and industry, and communities). The first section of the book defines and explains boundary work, discourses ofinterdisciplinarity, and the nature of interdisciplinary fields. In the second section, Klein examines dynamics of working across disciplines, including communication, collaboration, and learning with concrete examples and lessons from research projects and programs that transcend traditional fields. The closing chapter examines reasons for failure and success then presents gateways to literature and other resources. Throughout the book, Klein emphasizes the roles of contextualization and historical change while factoring in the shifting relationship of disciplinarity andinterdisciplinarity, ascendancy of transdisciplinarity, and intersections with other constructs including Mode 2 knowledge production, convergence, team science, and postdisciplinarity. The conceptual framework she provides also includes the role of boundary objects, agents, and organizations in brokering differences and creating for platforms for change. Klein further explains why translation, interlanguage, and a communication boundary space are vital to achieving intersubjectivity and collective identity. They foster not only pragmatics of negotiation and integration but also reflexivity, transactivity, and co-production of knowledge with stakeholders beyond the academy. Rhetorics of holism and synthesis compete with instrumentalities of problem solving and transgressive critiques. However, typical warrants today include complexity, contextualization, collaboration, and socially-robust knowledge. Crossing boundaries remains complex, but this book guides readers through the density of pertinent literature while expanding understandings of crossdisciplinary and cross-sector work. (shrink)

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