Transdisciplinary Inquiry
The idea of transdisciplinarity seems increasingly influential these days.
A reference appears, for example, in the Stockholm Resilience Centre "about us":
The Stockholm Resilience Centre is an international centre that advances transdisciplinary research for governance of social-ecological systems with a special emphasis on resilience - the ability to deal with change and continue to develop.
And in the Solutions Journal "about us":
Solutions uses a much more constructive, transdisciplinary review process than typical journals. We encourage collaboration and co-authorship between original authors and reviewers.
To learn more, I've been reading selections from the 2008 book Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice (hat tip to Don B.), edited by theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu. According to Nicolescu, the word transdisciplinarity was coined in 1970 by developmental psychologist Jean Piaget.
From Nicolescu's chapter, "In Vitro and In Vivo Knowledge – Methodology of Transdisciplinarity":
Multidisciplinarity: studying a research topic not in just one discipline but in several at the same time.
Interdisciplinarity: the transfer of methods from one discipline to another.
Transdisciplinarity: that which is at once between the disciplines, across different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines.
From the foreword by Alfonso Montuori:
Transdisciplinarity can be summarized as requiring:
1. A focus that is inquiry-driven rather than discipline driven. This does not involve a rejection of disciplinary knowledge, but the development of pertinent knowledge for the purposes of action in the world.
2. A stress on the construction of knowledge through an appreciation of the meta-paradigmatic dimension – in other words, the underlying assumptions that form the paradigm through which disciplines and perspectives construct knowledge. …
3. An understanding of the organization of knowledge, isomorphic at the cognitive and the institutional level, the history of reduction and disjunction (what Morin calls “simple thought”) and the importance of contextualization and connection (or “complex thought”).
4. The integration of the knower in the process of inquiry, which means that rather than attempting to eliminate the knower, the effort becomes one of acknowledging and making transparent the knower’s assumptions and the process through which s/he constructs knowledge.
