Science and Interdisciplinarity: A Treatise on the Philosophy of Interdisciplinary Research

There is an increasing drive towards interdisciplinarity in all fields of knowledge. The general schema is a necessary and ultimately useful one in generating new ideas and “big picture” conceptualizations of knowledge, yet an impediment to its large-scale adaptation by universities and the Acade...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Lucas W.E. Tessaro
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: ORDT: Organization for Research Development and Training 2022-05-01
Series:Journal of Interdisciplinary Sciences
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Online Access:https://journalofinterdisciplinarysciences.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/3-Science-and-Interdisciplinarity-A-Treatise-on-the-Philosophy-of-Interdisciplinary-Research.pdf
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Summary:There is an increasing drive towards interdisciplinarity in all fields of knowledge. The general schema is a necessary and ultimately useful one in generating new ideas and “big picture” conceptualizations of knowledge, yet an impediment to its large-scale adaptation by universities and the Academy is sometimes found within interdisciplinarians themselves. In this manuscript I outline several problems at the core of the “discipline of interdisciplinarity,” many of the questionable arguments used by some proponents of the field to justify their identification and determination of what is interdisciplinary, outline numerous examples of historical interdisciplinarity, and finally propose a New Argument that seeks to encompass all fields of research – disciplinary or otherwise – in a generalized fashion. The New Argument summarized is that if human endeavours are analysable into disciplines, then so too are disciplines into their fundamental components. Observing the parallels between disciplines, they are: 1) the subject, 2) the measure, 3) the method, and 4) the cause. The work draws heavily upon Aristotle, and hopes to clarify the muddied waters of interdisciplinarian debate.
ISSN:2594-3405