The seminar « Rethinking Interdisciplinarity » takes a break. Starting from April 2003 we have been debating around a variety of issues related to interdisciplinary research, its definition, organisation, assessment and future. Eight texts coming from very different perspectives have been open to discussion in English and French, 281 commentaries have been posted on the site by 65 different discussants. As moderators, we have filtered part of the messages coming from the general public, edited or rejected a number of commentaries that we found not relevant for the debate. Now we pause for the month of February and take the opportunity to sum up some of the themes that have emerged since now, thus hoping to give a chance to everybody to comment on this experience of a virtual forum, and give us a feed-back about possible improvements for the future.

The overall aim of the www.interdisciplines.org project of which our seminar is a part, is to develop specific tools to investigate and promote interdisciplinary research. It creates a virtual locus where researchers from different fields and disciplines can meet. It thus allows discussions that usually take place within the boundary of one’s department or discipline to emancipate from such boundaries. Our feeling is that the Web, with its “public face”, is an appropriate environment to understand how interdisciplinary projects grow, which interactions characterize these projects, how they acquire authority and have impact on mainstream research. It is so in particular because interactions of the Web leave tracks that can be analysed in order to understand researchers’ interests and behaviours. The eight papers that have been put on line during these months have given us the chance to tackle the issue of interdisciplinarity from a variety of perspectives. Nevertheless, browsing the archived discussions and texts, we had the feeling that some main themes have crossed most of the debates:

Definitions of interdisciplinarity

A recurring theme in the discussion has revolved around the meanings of a family of related concepts such as interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, etc. Maybe the most controversial notion has been the one of trandisciplinarity, which has been defined in different ways: Helga Nowotny relates it to the Mode-2 of scientific knowledge production and the transgression of disciplinary boundaries; Basarab Nicolescu and Edgar Morin attach a more specific meaning to transdisciplinarity as related to a more comprehensive framework that transcends the narrow scope of disciplinary research. Julie Klein tracks the history of this concept in her intervention The Transition to Transdisciplinarity. Are these differences just a matter of traditions of thought whose interest is more historical than substantial or do they really define alternative approaches to the problem? Also illuminating has been the history of the notion of ‘discipline’, which Ian Hacking tracked down through its positive and negative meanings, while Fuller described its socio-political role in the structuring of research institutions.

Interdisciplinarity: science and society

It has been argued that most interdisciplinary research at least in the past 150 years has been carried out in applied contexts (Dominique Pestre; Helga Nowotny). Aims and objects of the most innovative research projects within this period would have resulted from negotiation among a large number of different stakeholders. This means that the language game of science may be too narrow to account for the complex negotiations that different actors such as the private investors, the state or the local communities undertake in order to bring about technological innovation in our societies. The tension between the need of autonomous scientific standards and the involvement of science in society has been raised at various points in discussion. How can science be “democratically” assessed by citizens? How can we maintain independent criteria of accountability and quality control while “immerging” science in the global functioning of a democratic society? Fuller has pointed out the impediments of the short terms and very local objectives of a research that directly depends on social demands. Nowotny, on the contrary, has argued that laypeople’s participation to research can lead to fruitful research.

Interdisciplinarity and innovation

As Dan Sperber points out in his comment Reservations about 'consistency' and 'balance' some interdisciplinary work results in challenges - sometimes radical ones - to one or several of the disciplines involved. But that is how innovation in science emerges. What are then the relationships between interdisciplinarity and innovation? Is every innovative program in science necessarily interdisciplinary? Is innovation a fundamental criterion to understand and to assess interdisciplinary research? The innovative aspect of interdisciplinary research is made apparent by its evanescent character since successful interdisciplinary research may lead to the constitution of its own discipline.

Practical difficulties of doing interdisciplinary research

While the extent of the specific difficulties of interdisciplinary research can be questioned, it has been nonetheless possible to point out some major problems:

• Language: Each discipline evolves its own jargon. Interdisciplinarity thus requires the appropriation and accommodation of different languages. Communication of interdisciplinary research results may also prove to be difficult since it requires the use of technical terms borrowed to one discipline but that are not well understood by the audience coming from the other relevant disciplines.
• Methods: disciplines are often devoted to their own methods of investigation. This may lead to misunderstanding and opposition as the one illustrated by Bill Benzon about the controversy among anthropologists and psychologists over the book The Geography of Thought
• Institutional constraints: While institutions, often disciplinarily organised, may appear as the first impediment to interdisciplinary research, most authors and discussants have been careful to show the necessity and importance of institutions. Some have pointed out the ability of some institutions to foster interdisciplinary research.
• Cognitive constraints: it is obviously hard to become an expert in two or more disciplines. Yet, deep knowledge of different disciplines is needed for doing genuine interdisciplinary research. Is it possible to develop a truly interdisciplinary methodology? What is the impact of these difficulties on education and, more specifically, on the institutionalisation of interdisciplinary training programs?

Assessment of interdisciplinary research

One of the key issues that have emerged through the seminar, and in particular around Howard Gardner and Veronica Boix-Mansilla’s text, is that of the assessment of interdisciplinary research. To put in Grit Laudel’s words, who has proposed a session on this theme to the EASST conference, “inspired” by our web discussion: Interdisciplinary research is always a new synthesis of expertise. How can the necessary expertise be mounted to evaluate research results? The notion of peer review entails the idea that you are evaluated by someone who works on similar topics. But what if peers in that sense don’t exist? Must evaluators resort to second-order criteria such as counting of articles in high-impact journals, because nobody can judge the content of research? Are there procedures of synthesising peer competence that can overcome the problem? What are the norms that govern the complex social form of inquiries of contemporary science? Are they inevitably non-epistemic, as Steve Fuller suggests in his intervention: More on Trust? Is it possible a genuine interdisciplinary epistemology?

Autobiographical experience as “practical epistemology”

One of the goal of the seminar was to allow theoretical thinking to be informed by actual experience of interdisciplinary research. Thus Pierre Jacob, Dan Sperber and Ian Hacking have recounted their own experience with interdisciplinary research. The empirical data provided has largely been enriched with discussants relating their own experience and the communication of the results of social investigations from Gardner and Boix-Mansilla, Julie Klein and Grit Laudel. We hope that the gathering of these empirical data as well as the narratives of personal experiences can contribute to further thinking on interdisciplinarity. Do you think that some key phenomena have been left out?

Interdisciplinarity in the information society

One of our objectives in organizing this seminar was to understand how Internet is changing interdisciplinary research. We would therefore like to conclude this text by raising an issue that has been, up to now, not so much considered. Internet has introduced so-to-speak “soft-assembled” online research communities through lists, forums and web sites such as interdisciplines.org, that reduce the cost of organizing interdisciplinary research and the institutional load of “locating” these research networks or groups of in more stable structures. What is the impact of these techniques on the quality of research? The introduction of search engines might also bring changes in the disciplinary structure of science. Indeed, keywords search allow new clustering of documents through criteria – such as occurrence of the given keyword in the documents and its evaluated appreciation by agents of the Web – which ignore disciplines. Keywords thus create a common intellectual arena in which the pooling, combination, selection and recombination of ideas is realized by breaking the standard disciplinary boundaries. What are the consequences of the massive use of search engines on the organization of research? Are the content-driven information assemblies generated by search engines the beginning of a entirely new method of classifying knowledge domains?

These are just some of the issues that have been raised through the seminar. We hope that they can a starting point for a general discussion about the contents, the format and the possible developments of our seminar. In the meantime, thank you for the lively discussions until now. We have learned a lot and really hope that you have enjoyed to share all this together.

Gloria and Christophe