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Synthese (2013) 190:18651879
DOI 10.1007/s11229-012-0179-7
Received: 10 October 2011 / Accepted: 8 September 2012 / Published online: 25 September 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract In this paper I attempt to answer the question: What is interdisciplinary communication? I attempt to answer this question, rather than what some might consider the ontologically prior questionwhat is interdisciplinarity (ID)?for two reasons: (1) there is no generally agreed-upon definition of ID; and (2) ones views regarding interdisciplinary communication have a normative relationship with ones other views of ID, including ones views of its very essence. I support these claims with reference to the growing literature on ID, which has a marked tendency to favor the idea that interdisciplinary communication entails some kind of integration. The literature on ID does not yet include very many philosophers, but we have something valuable to offer in addressing the question of interdisciplinary communication. Playing somewhat fast-and-loose with traditional categories of the subdisciplines of philosophy, I group some philosophersmostly from the philosophy of science, socialpolitical philosophy, and moral theoryand some non-philosophers together to provide three different, but related, answers to the question of interdisciplinary communication. The groups are as follows: (1) HabermasKlein, (2) KuhnMacIntyre, and (3) Bataille Lyotard. These groups can also be thought of in terms of the types of answers they give to the question of interdisciplinary communication, especially in terms of the following key words (where the numbers correspond to the groups from the previous sentence): (1) consensus, (2) incommensurability, and (3) invention.
Keywords Interdisciplinarity Transdisciplinarity Communication
Integration Consensus Incommensurability Invention
J. B. Holbrook (B)
Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle #310920, Denton, TX 76203-5017, USAe-mail: [email protected]
What is interdisciplinary communication? Reections on the very idea of disciplinary integration
J. Britt Holbrook
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Disciplinarity should be treated as a necessary evil of knowledge productionthe more necessary it is made to appear, the more evil it becomes.
Steve Fuller
1 Introduction
As Klein (2010) illustrates, scholars of interdisciplinarity (ID) today are quick to allow that there currently exists no generally agreed-upon definition of the term. Instead, there is a plethora of definitions, which are often accompanied by variations on the term [multidisciplinarity (MD), transdisciplinarity (TD), narrow, wide, and...