Disciplina in Latin refers to the training of a discipulus: it is mainly a pedagogical notion. My feeling is that we’re using the term in this very sense even in the contemporary debate. A "discipline" is not only a corpus of knowledge, but a method of training and molding young minds.

Perhaps, we should get rid of the whole idea of a discipline in this sense to be able to develop trans-, multi, inter- what? research projects.

Disciplines, as Stephen Turner has suggested, have two elements to their definition. One is nominal: the discipline must be called a discipline. The other is related to the actual facts of employment: there must be persons trained in the name of the discipline and the beginnings of a labour market. What does this mean for cross-, inter-,multi etc. disciplinarity? The impediments mentioned by Tim Moore can arise within a discipline and between. But they will also continue to arise as long as disciplinarization assures privileged access to the market of students and their employment chances. Thus, interdisciplinarity, apart from other benefits, must also look beyond and find new opportunities for its students

I don’t have an absolute answer. The Oxford English Dictionary, though, provides credible clues. The first listing for the meaning of “instruction imparted to disciplines or scholars” is in 1382. The first listing for a “branch of instruction or education” is in 1386. The first listing for “instruction having its aim to form the pupil to proper conduct and action” is in 1434. The first listing for “the orderly conduct and action which result from training” is in 1509. The first listing for “The order maintained and observed among pupils, or other persons under control” is in 1450. Of added note, the first listing for “to subject to discipline,” derived from the French “discipliner” or Med. Latin “disciplinare” and Latin “disciplina,” is in 1382.

What is instructive about this chronicle is the fact that the earliest listings are in the fourteenth century, after the initial transition from the secular cathedral schools to the “universitas “ began and moving toward greater codifications of learning that would take place in the Renaissance.

To begin with, science has never been aimed at the production of “merely reliable knowledge.” It has been aimed at reliable and relevant knowledge. Various forms of relevance have been involved: explanatory relevance and practical relevance in particular. Practical relevance, which guides the bulk of funding and institutional support for research, has always been evaluated at a societal level (but not always democratically so, of course). Engaging in scientific inquiry has been and is, if anything, a move away from “socially robust knowledge” and towards knowledge that might not be understood by the society at large, and not even easily understood by the scientific community, or, if understood, might not be readily accepted. Galileo and others have paid dearly from such non-conformism. Historically, the most “socially robust knowledge” has been in the form of systems of religious beliefs that have been generally accepted, each within its own religious community, with very little change over centuries – except, of course, that religious beliefs are not knowledge.

I see also a tension, not to say a contradiction, between the plea for socially robust knowledge and Nowotny’s praise of the “transgressive” character of knowledge. Surely the more transgressive contributions to knowledge go against socially robust ideas. Or am I missing something?

‘Socially robust knowledge’ has nothing to do with religious beliefs (they are not knowledge in this sense and I would strongly object to call any kind of dogmatism or fundamentalism ‘socially robust’). Social robustness describes a process which allows the unforeseen to enter not only on the side of science dealing with Nature, but also with Society. Robustness is produced when research has been infiltrated and improved by social knowledge. Like any knowledge production, it is subject to frequent testing, feedback and improvement, because it is open-ended.

Social robustness is about making science, and the research process, more open to societal expectations and demands. It is also about inventing institutional arrangements and other social forms that allow such negotiations to be carried out, hopefully with results that will benefit knowledge, and knowledge production, as a public good. This does not imply “anything goes”.

A long time ago, politics and science had to agree that ‘scientific truth’ cannot be politically negotiated and Merton’s famous defense of the scientific ethos against the fascist and totalitarian regimes of his day were along this line. Today, democratic societies are faced with finding incentives for the private sector to invest more in research, since practically everywhere, and in some countries with dramatic effect, public funding is leveling off or declining. Now call this ‘commercialisation’ or commodification’ of science and research, if you wish, but in the end it will depend on the fine-grained, yes “transdisciplinary” and often local negotiations of how specific problems are to be defined and which solutions are deemed satisfactory to all participants involved in knowledge production which is distributed throughout society.

What is special in calling for social robustness is to make this process explicit, to render it visible, so that interventions are possible when they are needed. Following Hirschman’s distinction, ‘voice’ is one of the options and we are far from having found satisfactory, not only democratically legitimate, but also democratically effective ways, of providing for it. What scientists (and politicians in a different way) obviously fear most is the ‘exit’ option. But what can no longer be taken for granted, neither by scientists, nor by politicians, is ‘loyality’. It has to be gained, and regained, not only after every scandal and controversy implicating science, technology and politics in ways which are often difficult to entangle but which reflect how the real world of ‘Science, Money and Politics’ operates (as Daniel S. Greenberg has so uncannily shown). Loyality itself needs a socially robust and sustainable basis, if science is to thrive as a social and cultural practice also in the future.

Transgressiveness is such a powerful force, because it is alive and active in each of us as a human being and allows us collectively to transform knowledge into humanitys highest achievements and most shameful defeats. Undoubtedly, part of the transgressive character of knowledge is tamed by working for the market and will be distorted by crass commercialization. Part of it is being tamed by the military for unprecedented high-tech exploits and ever more sophisticated weaponry. Part of it will be squandered by perhaps well-intentioned, but ill-conceived large scale planning efforts, be it publicly administered or channeled through large corporations, especially in the so-called developing countries. But part of it will continue to seep through all institutional walls and cross disciplinary as well as institutional boundaries. It will crop up locally, in unpredictable places and circumstances, subverting what economists predict about human motivation. It will not ‘speak truth to power’, because power sees no reason to even listen to it, but it will continue to whisper and eventually become a loud voice which can no longer be overheard.

Transdisciplinarity and the concept of the agora is an attempt to find a place, indeed many, heterogeneous places, to let the transgressivity of knowledge and the ultimate robustness of society encounter each other and to find solutions to problems that both must recognize as somehow being also ‘theirs’. Negotiations must take place and new institutional arrangements be invented and implemented. There will a lot of local, regional and national variation. What may work in a university setting, may not be good for a research council or a local initiative. What may work in the US, might not work in France or Switzerland. ‘Voice’ must always be conceived in the plural. As with language, its production is inherently infinite, but still meets the constraints of grammatical rules and semantic content or how democratic institutions and the research process work at a given time and place. Transdisciplinarity may be conceptually vague, but it has the advantage of being adaptable under circumstances that may not all be foreseen, nor do I want them to be legislated. In this sense, transdisciplinarity is also an appeal to our collective imagination, to help bring about institutions that do not yet exist, but which carry the promise of reconciling robustness and the transgressivity of knowledge – not once and for all, but again and again.

I would not belabour this terminological point if the strong reliance on rhetorical effects in Helga's paper and responses to comments (some of which have been, it is true, no less rhetorical) did not, for me at least, detract from the main thrust of her argument. It underscores the risk that shifting part of scientific communication to the "agora" would give -- is already giving -- much greater weight to rhetorical devices in deciding issues, something that, as an empirical scientist, I find quite unappealing. This, of course, is only one consideration in the issue of deciding who should participate in scientific conversation and in what ways. It is not, however, a minor consideration, for, precisely, what we want to avoid is that scientific views of little merit should become socially entrenched because of their rhetorical appeal. This of course is already happening, as a perverse effect of the otherwise encouraging success of popular science publishing, and its feedback effect on scientific practice through its influence on funding agencies, on students, and on scientists themselves.

Consider all this rhetoric: I was struck by how Dan made a completely false (empirically speaking) statement about religious belief systems never changing – and then Helga immediately agreed with him, perhaps to express a common ethos. (Yet, one wonders how they imagined the history of modern science would have proceeded, were it not for mutations of the Christian belief system!) This to me is quintessential rhetoric, but it’s quite normal: Two speakers quickly restrict the domain of discourse by adopting some false assumptions that will hopefully lead to some fruitful outcomes. Again, I was struck by how Dan and Helga can easily talk about the pros and cons of ‘reliability’ as an epistemic value, given its elastic meaning from the pseudo-mathematical to the crypto-ethical. Of course, the possibility of empirical inquiry presupposes that reliability can be given some kind of clear and workable analysis at some point, but for now the concept hangs as a nebulous promissory note without losing anyone any sleep – as they then move on to ‘relevance’.

I say all this because accusing people simply of using rhetoric is pejorative without being informative. But stayed tune for more…

The problem with Modespeak is that it opens the door so widely that, in principle, almost anything can influence the research agenda, including a market-generated paymaster, and there is little to discriminate good from bad influence on research (either ‘ex ante’ or ‘ex post’). Moreover, there’s the other side of this coin, which is the way academics might help transform the non-academic entities attempting to influence their work. For example, in the increasingly ephemeral world of business, corporate managers could learn something about the dynamic-yet-stabilizing processes of universities as corporate entities (Fuller 2002: chap. 1). However, for now Modespeak clearly tends to portray Mode 1 guys like Sperber as in need of rehabilitation.

Fuller, Steve. (2002). Knowledge Management Foundations. Woburn MA: Butterworth-Heinemann

Dan Sperber: Agreed. To express oneself with the goal of convincing others is to engage in a rhetorical activity. Nothing wrong with that, and I never accused anybody of doing so.

SF: “The suggestion that there is some clear distinction between ‘empirical’ and ‘rhetorical’ is untenable: Both are necessary features of any communicative and informative medium, and each normally enhances the other.”

DS: Note that Steve is using in the second sentence the distinction he was objecting to in the first sentence. Even more relevant here: The idea that the descriptive (a term I prefer to Steve's "empirical") and rhetorical goals in communication normally enhance each other is wonderfully optimistic. Steve must never listen to, or read politicians. But forget politicians, we scientists often find ourselves having a hard time reconciling descriptive adequacy and persuasiveness, and we end up making, more or less consciously, choices of words that somewhat compromise one goal or the other (hoping that at the end of the day, both goals will have been adequately served).

SF: “Of course, the possibility of empirical inquiry presupposes that reliability can be given some kind of clear and workable analysis at some point, but for now the concept hangs as a nebulous promissory note without losing anyone any sleep.”

DS: For most empirical scientists and also most philosophers of science, having and using clear reliability criteria is a central concern. Social scientists who don’t loose any sleep, or any time at all, on such issues of reliability of knowledge are, it seems to me, out of touch.

DS; What I did, in the message Steve is responding to, was question Helga’s use of the phrase “socially robust knowledge,” saying that these words were “chosen as much or more for their rhetorical appeal than for their descriptive adequacy.” (Not an accusation). I would be curious to know what Steve thinks of “socially robust knowledge” (the phrase and the idea)?

DS:… we scientists often find ourselves having a hard time reconciling descriptive adequacy and persuasiveness, and we end up making, more or less consciously, choices of words that somewhat compromise one goal or the other (hoping that at the end of the day, both goals will have been adequately served).

SF: Actually I don’t see things quite this way. When, say, Richard Dawkins uses an expression like ‘selfish gene’, he thinks he is saying exactly what needs to be said to the audience he wants to say it to. Each aspect of this process is empirical and rhetorical simultaneously. If people don’t like what he says or misunderstand what he says, then that is also simultaneously an empirical and rhetorical error – though on whose part exactly is an open question. We don’t need to be talking about the ‘compromising’ of one or the other aim of speech unless we presuppose some objective realm of true propositions which empirical science aims for (by its fallible means) and rhetoric aims to convey (by its separate fallible means). Perhaps you would say that Dawkins is ‘forced’ to talk baldly about ‘selfish genes’ because people don’t know enough evolutionary biology to understand subtler formulations, but I would then interpret you as simply expressing a wish that ordinary people had the biologist’s interest in asking biological questions.

DS: For most empirical scientists and also most philosophers of science, having and using clear reliability criteria is a central concern. Social scientists who don’t loose any sleep, or any time at all, on such issues of reliability of knowledge are, it seems to me, out of touch.

SF: I never denied that there are lots of people worrying about something they call ‘reliability’ – the question is whether these worries have anything in common other than a word: The most precise understanding of this word is in the methodology of experimentation. There are also some philosophers who come up with abstract models of reliability that basically stick variables on intuitions but don’t actually measure anything. And finally, there is much vaguer talk by sociologists about ‘reliable processes’ like peer-review, where ‘reliability’ is a polite way of talking about the ‘old boys network’. Perhaps you think there is a deep concept hidden here. I’d like to hear about it, and how it influences any epistemic judgements you actually make.

More follows....

SF: I did not make myself clear before: I agree with Helga here – ‘transgressive knowledge’ is often ‘socially robust knowledge’ in the sense of forcing the academic to validate her knowledge by something other than the standard research paradigms. In that respect, ecological validity in social psychology and participatory action research are examples of both ‘transgressive’ and ‘socially robust’ knowledge. This is, so to speak, the good side of Mode 2. As I indicated before, however, transgressive/socially-robust forms of knowledges are not NECESSARILY good things. And here I share some of your qualms about the extent to which research integrity and academic autonomy might be compromised. But once again, the Modespeak obscures more than clarifies. So, my advice is let’s drop worrying about the meaning of words and talk about what really bothers us.

Dan has said nothing further, although he conceded in his first reply to Nowotny that there may be a misunderstanding lurking. He said he believed that there is a tension "between the plea for socially robust knowledge and Nowotny’s praise of the “transgressive” character of knowledge. Surely the more transgressive contributions to knowledge go against socially robust ideas." What does this mean?

After reading Helga's replies to Dan it is unclear to me if she identifies "transgressiveness" with "social robustness". Could these concepts not be put in a few simple words? E.g. "Social robustness is about making science, and the research process, more open to societal expectations and demands." (Nowotny) Now, what is meant here by "science" or "research process"? Are extrascientific actors to generally have a voice in the selection of the subject matters of scientific knowledge production (e.g. the selection of "problems"? Or research questions?). Or does it mean that such actors are to contribute to knowledge production as such, i.e. the methodologically regulated production of knowledge? Or are extrascientific actors a "knowledge-resource" for research? Since, as Helga seems to claim, the control over knowledge production is threatended to be taken out of the hands of "science" by its "commercialisation" or "commodification" it needs to be claimed back by "the public". Well, if the "commercialisation" or "commodification" of scientific knowledge production is the problem, then why not simply claim the latter back for science proper. I take it from some of Helga's other remarks that this is not feasible since there isn't (and never was) any such thing as science proper. But then why exactly has "commercialisation" or "commodification" become troublesome in the first place? Is the latter, then, not the "normal" way that knowledge production is (and has been) done? And if this is so, is Helga's aim to claim knowledge production for the public because that is where it has belonged all along - quite independently of "commercialisation" or "commodification"? Mind you, I find the claims by Helga about the questions of "voice", "opting out", or "loyalty" (in her introductory essay) very confusing since they seem to utterly mix normative and descriptive claims in the mode 2 agenda. It seems to me that if empirical data says anything about people's attitudes and perceptions about science then it is that these attitudes and perceptions have, in fact, changed rather little in the last 40 years or so.

Steve says that "‘transgressive knowledge’ is often ‘socially robust knowledge’ in the sense of forcing the academic to validate her knowledge by something other than the standard research paradigms." But it seems to me so far that "transgressiveness" and "social robustness" of knowledge are perfectly independent notions and I can't see how the transgressiveness of knowledge implies anything about its social robustness, or vice versa.

"in Modespeak, ‘socially robust’ means more like ‘robust under substantially different social environments’. This concept is ‘transgressive’ of traditional academic research, whereby a knowledge claim is accountable only to academic peers – and not, say, the subjects/objects of knowledge, or the funders, or the larger society. So what is being ‘transgressed’ is the boundary between academic and non-academic. Each of the non-academic groups have their own criteria of validity and producing a knowledge claim that can survive across all those settings is ‘socially robust’."

Given that, indeed, "each of the non-academic groups have their own criteria of validity," and that these criteria typically diverge within society and even more across societies and cultures, the only true kind of "socially robust knowledge" by this criterion is the most robust knowledge by standard scientific criteria, that somehow achieves obviousness across social contexts just as does knowledge that snow is cold, that dogs bark, and that triangles have three sides. So mathematical theorems, heliocentrism, Hartley's explanation of the role of the heart, and other comparable scientific achievments survive across more "substantially different social environments" than, say, any piece of social science (none of which is robust by standard scientific criteria). These are the most socially robust pieces of scientific knowledge by the definition proposed, and this because they are the most scientifically robust to begin with. (And, by the way, what is "transgressive" about these superb instances of "social robustness"?) On the other hand, satisfying the non-academic, group-specific criteria of validity of some given social group is a sure way of not satisfying those of other groups and of not producing "socially robust knowledge." Very confusing. Or am I again missing something?

I state this crudely because, in contrast, much less control of the context of reception exists in the social sciences. Serious doubts can be raised about whether economic theories and ‘findings’ apply to economic reality, etc. This is because the subjects of these theories have their own views and insights into the matters covered by the theories, and it is not clear prima facie that the social scientific theories carry more legitimacy than the views of the subjects of those theories. This is related to the ambiguous status of methodology in the social sciences. If you use very rigourous, lab-like methods, your results lack ecological validity and you’re treating your subjects like rocks and trees. But if you take your subjects at their word, you’re seen as unrigourous, etc.

Striking the right balance between these two extremes involves transgressing the academic-nonacademic boundary, implying some kind of hybrid methodological resolution. Part of the Mode 2 story is that as the natural sciences are increasingly subject to application-driven research, they are also adopting the pattern of work familiar to social scientists, where criteria of validity need to be forged with clients and stakeholders.

To go back to this troublesome word ‘robust’: Imagine two situations where something might be ‘socially robust’. One is if it can alter its environment to enable it to survive easily, even if it means eliminating other things in the environment (e.g. the displacement of folk knowledge by scientific knowledge). Another is if it can alter itself to suit the environment in which it needs to survive (e.g. arrive at some folk/scientific hybrid). Your examples from the natural sciences are like the first sense, but the Modespeakers are interested in the second sense, which is becoming more prevalent.

What are the needs that drive this new utopia of science? What is the image of science that Nowotny wants to replace? One need she addresses is the "unity of knowledge" but it is not discussed further. The other is the desideratum of "joint problem solving" and this is where her project has its origins. Certainly, there are kinds of problems whose definition is a task that exceeds the capacities of the science system alone. Environmental problems, social problems, problems of development could be general examples. One scandalon, tacitly implied by Nowotny, could be science arrogating this task to itself - an arrogance that owes much to some of the older utopias of science (Bacon's for example) and that is still represented in expertocratic tendencies in the implementation of science policy today. But Nowotny wants to go further in claiming that transdisciplinary science, in the end, will be better science since it will produce better (i.e. "socially reliable") knowledge.

It seems that Nowotny's claims regard the relationship between science and society much more than the relationships between different areas in science. But do scientists really need a call for emancipation? Are most scientists still in fact blind, deaf, and dumb to the presuppositions or the implications of their work? Is it not policy-makers that are to be targeted here since, in the course of the 20th century, science has lost much of its internal steering capacities anyway? Doubtlessly scientists tend to underestimate the tacit role of internal factors and agendas when considering the selection of research targets or knowledge desiderata and much could be acheived in this area by strengthening the according reflective capabilites in science. But will this indeed lead to a more "socially robust knowledge"? Does not this latter concept tend to be misleading since it does not account for science's own capacities to contribute to reform and emancipation? And how does the concept of "socially reliable" fit into democracies since, as much of the experience with "participatory science" amply demonstrates, the latter can by no means be identified with "democratic science"? Is there really a need for scientists to be much more socially or politically conscious in their work? And is science really to be governed after the paradigms of political or economical governance? It seems to me that the implications (and the historical precedents) of all this may still need more thorough reflection on the part of science studies.

Obviously, accountability is no panacea. It can be distorted and distorting, it can stifle creativity if it is carried too far or if it becomes just another bureaucratic control mechanism. If anything, it is closer to a dystopia than to a new utopia of science. But it will not go away. It is up to emancipated scientists – of whom I wish there would be many more – to invent new forms and stable, future-oriented institutional arrangements that meet the demands for “joint problem solving”. Hence, this is not a question of being ‘socially or politically more conscious of their work’, nor of submitting science under ‘political or economic governance’. But it can be read as an appeal to ‘science’ and to some ‘scientists’ to emancipate themselves from their belief that they somehow stand outside ‘society’ – hence my claim that transdisciplinary science might in the end lead to ‘better science’- which is to be jointly defined.

Inventée au Danemark en 1987, la conférence de consensus (ou conférence de citoyens) organise la rencontre entre des experts, des groupes d'intérêts constitués et un jury de citoyens extérieur à la controverse, chargé de produire des recommandations destinées aux décideurs politiques. Tous les observateurs de telles conférences sont frappés par la qualité des échanges, la capacité des non-spécialistes à «saisir les dimensions stratégiques de la recherche scientifique», à produire des recommandations mesurées qui «proposent des solutions de bon sens», à composer avec les différents intérêts et à faire émerger ce point commun improbable: la volonté générale d’une intelligence collective.

Qu'ils soient spontanés ou organisés, en actuel ou en virtuel sur Internet, ces colloques (ou forums) hybrides entre spécialistes et non-spécialistes déstabilisent le partage entre savants et citoyens ordinaires. Ils démontrent que la pensée disciplinaire n'est ni la seule possible ni la seule valable; que la capacité de diagnostic, d'interprétation des faits, d'exploration des solutions envisageables, n'est pas l'apanage des spécialistes. En outre, ces manifestations forcent à reconnaître que les profanes apportent une autre forme de savoir, une prudence, qui contribue à rendre la science plus objective, si l'on convient de penser qu’elle l'est d'autant plus qu’elle aura répondu à un maximum d'objections. Il est temps de reconnaître que l'inculture scientifique affecte aussi bien les scientifiques professionnels que les non-scientifiques. En effet, dans l'état actuel d'ultra-spécialisation, le niveau d'ignorance concernant un domaine particulier est pratiquement aussi élevé dans la collectivité scientifique, dont la plupart des membres travaillent dans d'autres domaines, que parmi les profanes. On n'a donc pas affaire à un large fossé unique entre scientifiques et non-scientifiques, mais à une multitude d’hiatus particuliers entre spécialistes des disciplines et non-spécialistes dans chaque domaine. La science n'est pas une vaste île séparée du continent de la culture, mais un archipel éparpillé d'îlots, parfois plus éloignés les uns des autres que du continent. Un expert d’une discipline dans un certain champ est un non-expert dans presque tous les autres disciplines, et se trouve donc fort proche du profane total du point de vue de la culture scientifique en général. Aujourd’hui, la culture des cultivés, c'est de savoir des petits riens sur tout; celle des spécialistes, de savoir tout sur rien.

Si le sens commun n’est pas une base solide pour la pensée scientifique disciplinaire, il n’en existe cependant pas d’autre possible. La méthode scientifique est alors celle du sens commun critique. Quand un scientifique formule une hypothèse, en déduit des conséquences, collecte des données et transmet ses résultats à ses collègues; ses processus de pensée sont-ils, en dépit de la complexité de leurs objets, si différents des processus naturels de pensée? Einstein ne disait-il pas que “la science tout entière est un raffinement de la pensée de tous les jours”?

Many public authorities, Paulius Kulikauskas observed at the Zurich conference on Transdisciplinarity, are now eager to engage in experiments, demonstrations and pilot projects in the name of “transdisciplinarity,” “sustainability” and “participation.” Their interest is fueled in part by disappointment in traditional approaches to urban renewal. However, integrating concepts of participation and transdisciplinarity into general governance culture on a long-term basis is a complex task. Kongens Engave, a neighborhood in southwest Copenhagen, is the only area under the Danish Urban Regeneration Experiment that has both a locally-elected council and a government subsidy. When residents became involved in the planning process, they formed sectoral working groups in areas such as physical problems, housing, culture, employment and social issues. As a result of participation, criteria for success became more holistic and locally oriented. It took a lot of patience to get to that point, however.

I would also point to the shift from ineffectual technology transfer to cooperation in development activities. In the South, indigenous knowledge and accessible forms of traditional technology are valued. In the past, however, interactions between North and South tended to be one-way applications of knowledge delivered by a “first-civilization” to a “second civilization.” They were not appropriate to local social, cultural, economic, and ecological realities. An imbalance continues, but, Hansjurg Mey and others pointed out at Zurich, transdisciplinary perspective has the potential for integrating Northern and Southern views. Discussions occur on two levels: the North-South gap and the gap between scientific elite and the majority.

Meeting – and accomodating – ‘real’ lay persons therefore predisposes their willingness to alter the image they have in their own imagination. In the end, they will remain experts, but perhaps with greater respect for the cognitive and social autonomy of lay persons.

La pratique médicale nous impose aujourd'hui, pire encore demain sûrement, une répartition des tâches, une division du travail, toujours plus poussée: des spécialisations de plus en plus pointues, eu égard au volume d'informations en croissance exponentielle. La médecine qui a commencé par être une branche unique, puis s'est divisé en plusieurs spécialités, lesquelles spécialités tendent à s'éclater à vue d'œil en des spécialités de plus en plus étroites… Cette tendance qu’a la médecine à s’émietter a bien entendu d’autres causes ; par exemple, le fait d’être un spécialiste en quelque domaine de la médecine a de nos jours un grand prestige social.

Mais la sur-spécialisation est désastreuse, d’une part, quand il s’agit de vouloir guider une recherche pluridisciplinaire ou de mettre en oeuvre des politiques concernant la médecine où la décision et l’action requièrent un jugement qui, finalement, doit être synthétique et non analytique. D’autre part, un malade n’est pas une simple juxtaposition d’organes ou de fonctions, mais une organisation vivante, cohérente, où les relations entre les parties sont au moins aussi importantes que les parties elles-mêmes.

L’introduction des nouvelles technologies pour traiter l’information médicale et aider à la pratique médicale, n’a pas encore apporté tous ses fruits. Comme le suggère le professeur François Grémy: "l’essentiel de l’impact des sciences de l’information en médecine est d’abord et avant tout culturel. Si les premiers contacts entre elles et la médecine n’ont pas été décisifs, et ont même été grevés d’échecs, c’est qu’ils ont été l’occasion de l’affrontement de deux modes de pensées très différents au départ. Les sciences de l’information ont représenté pour les médecins un miroir assez cruel des faiblesses méthodologiques de la médecine... Ceux parmi les médecins qui ont eu le courage de faire face à ce constat, et qui ont compris l’apport hautement significatif du nouvel outillage mental que l’informatique représente, se sont livrés à une remise en cause profonde de leur mode de pensée. Ils ont compris que devenait nécessaire un nouveau regard de la médecine sur elle-même: une méta-médecine...".

Bref, une révolution scientifique en médecine est nécessaire pour résorber la crise de croissance qui la traverse depuis la fin du XXe siècle; mais elle ne peut se faire que par une réorganisation des disciplines médicales utilisant des « niveaux méta » de la connaissance médicale, et par une intégration adéquate des sciences cognitives…

While there are significant differences in some of these definitions – around whose philosophy to follow and which problems will be addressed -- in all cases the discourse of transdisicplinarity is truly “trangressive,” to borrow Helga’s emphasis. Today’s transdisciplinary initiatives demand movement beyond older forms of interdisciplinary cooperation and a radical blurring of all boundaries (not just the divides of disciplines but the gap between the academy and the agora). They also underscore the heterogeneity of knowledge. There is no longer, as Helga points, out a single hierarchical formation. These initial threads for our second seminar recall to mind several developments over the course of the Sperber seminar.

The more we talked, the more prominent problem-focus became as a driving force in our conceptualization of interidsicplinarity. The nature of problems differed (from abstract intellectuality to the Lebenswelt). The scope differed (from small intellectual questions to large-scale social issues). The structures in which problems were addressed differed (from small projects to centers to the formation of new fields). Yet, problems (not interdisciplinarity per se) emerged as a common point of reference. We also moved to a position of heterogeneity. A variety of structures, concepts, and methods are now available to the researcher, even if particular cognitive and social constraints dictate one choice over others. And now, with transdisciplinarity, we kick the door open more, problematizing not only disciplinarity but interdisciplinarity as previously understood. As we talk this month, I hope we’ll also keep a question that Dan raised in the first seminar alive. How radical are the changes we are discussing? Is there indeed a fundamental change taking root?

Heterogeneity, as mentioned by Julie, can already be overwhelming. Can we, should we, go one step further and ‘kick the door more open’? But is this not one of the deeper roots of scientific curiosity as well? Are we not obliged, in the sense of obliging ourselves, to keep raising questions, even if ready answers are not yet at hand? Should we not start to think what the transition to transdisciplinarity would mean – for instance in designing a curriculum, with problem-focus and problem-choice at the center, with all the implications to our students and ourselves?

One of the big problems with the Mode 2 concept is its theoretical fuzziness. It never became clear in their texts if the authors claim a world-wide displacement of Mode 1 knowledge production by Mode 2 knowledge production. In the subsequent reception of the concept by STS researchers it was mainly interpreted this way (e.g. Weingart 1997; Godin 1998, Shinn 1999). To answer Julies’ question, up to now, there is no empirical evidence for a fundamental change that encompasses the whole science system. The authors neither give a proof for such a fundamental change in their 1994 book, nor in their 2001 book. The lack of empirical proofs was one of the major critiques, formulated by one of the panel members, Peter Weingart (1997). Given this poor empirical background, one could just ignore Mode 2. But there is a danger that comes from a completely other side: Science policy is starting to overtake this concept and to turn it into a “self-fulfilling prophecy” (Shinn 1999: 172-173, Gläser 2000: 462-463). Transdisciplinarity, socially robustness might then become criteria for funding research whether or not it makes sense.

Gläser, Jochen, 2000. Limits of change: cognitive constraints on "postmodernization'' and the political redirection of science. Social Science Information 39: 439-465.

Godin, Benoit, 1998. Writing Performative History: The New New Atlantis? Social Studies of Science 28: 465-483.

Shinn, Terry, 1999. Change or Mutation? Reflections on the Foundations of Contemporary Science. Social Science Information 38: 149-176.

Weingart, Peter, 1997. From "Finalization" to "Mode 2": Old Wine in New Bottles? Social Science Information 36: 591-613.

At least, 'interdisciplinarity' had the virtue of supposing that whatever forms of knowledge had not been covered by traditional academic disciplines could be tackled by combining – and perhaps even transforming – two or more disciplines. In contrast, 'transdisciplinarity' seems to imply much more than the obvious idea that many socially relevant problems arise outside the research agendas of academic disciplines. It also seems to deny any special role for the university in resolving these problems or capturing the knowledge that is produced in the process.

Somewhat in anticipation of my October paper for this conference, I think it's very important to defend the university as more than a glorified car park (a.k.a. 'agora') that provides a mutually convenient location for the state, industry, and experts to manufacture some mutually beneficial knowledge. The university is in the business of producing knowledge as a 'public good', which means (among other things) that whatever knowledge is produced is made as widely available as possible. This charge is much more proactive than allowing knowledge to 'seep' (or should I say 'trickle down') from its original networks to those lucky enough to capture it. Yet, this state-of-affairs appears to be an aspiration of Modespeakers like Nowotny.

I am very struck by the lack of attention to power relations in Nowotny's discussion of the agora. What enabled the agora to function as an exemplar of democratic governance was that only Athenian citizens – i.e. mutually recognized peers – could participate. In the agoras envisaged by Nowotny, there are often considerable power asymmetries among the parties. For example, when Nowotny says that the best scientific solution is the one that takes society into account, she appears to mean something much less egalitarian than it sounds – namely, the incorporation of potential consumers in the design of a new product. In this way, we 'anticipate future controversies where the products of science and technology might be refused and contested'. If this is so, we have reached an Orwellian situation – perhaps befitting the bureaucratic world where Modespeak thrives: 'Giving voice' becomes identical with co-optation, and the mark of democratic science governance is that criticism is not expressed and addressed but pre-empted and contained.

As for Helga’s appealing to something less egalitarian than it sounds – “the incorporation of potential consumers in the design of a new product” – the original Mode 2 hypothesis in NEW PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE was heavily oriented to industrial application. True. However, in RETHINKING SCIENCE, Helga and colleagues responded to some of the criticism and moved in a wider direction. We ought to be looking there and admitting an even larger family of examples into our discussion.

As for Steve’s charge that there are often “considerable power asymmetries among the parties” in the agoras Helga envisages, his counter history lesson is not convincing. Steve tells us “What enabled the agora to function as an exemplar of democratic governance was that only Athenian citizens – i.e. mutually recognized peers – could participate.” If you were a woman or a slave, you were not a “mutually recognized” peer, hence ineligible for citizenship and its attendant privileges. A clear example of preemption and containment, if ever I saw one. One of the benefits of the new push for transdisciplinarity, for all its accompanying difficulties and legitimate points of critique, is giving a say to once-silenced voices.

I’d add that the explosion of new internet forums should remind us of the need for agreement on rules of communication in such forums. Spirited debate is one thing. Demeaning the notion of the agora as the glib notion of “a glorified car park (a.k.a. 'agora')” does not contribute productively to understanding. Nor does the over-generalization of an Orwellian world “where Modespeak thrives,” or mocking 'Giving voice” as nothing more than “co-optation.” A little less satiric generalization and more complexity of facts in argument, please

Nevertheless, as I expected, transdisciplinarity is instinctively anti-university – at least judged by Julie’s response. The points she raises about the shortcomings about universities are of course correct, but transdisciplinarity as conceived by Modespeakers is at best a stopgap solution to them. Ultimately one needs to INSTITUTIONALIZE inclusiveness and openness and all the other democratic virtues, and universities have been historically the best knowledge producing entities to do that. ‘Affirmative action’ is something that universities – not think tanks, R& D divisions, research parks, or even self-organizing networks -- institutionalise. Moreover, Modespeakers talk up a storm about networking but little about consolidating the knowledge that networks produce so that it is made generally available.

Julie’s response to my critique of ‘agora’ is interesting because she brings up the hidden asymmetries in the concept that are no less pertinent to transdisciplinarity. What she says is unwittingly one more reason for abandoning the word ‘agora’.

I’m also sorry that Julie thinks I am overstepping internet etiquette, but I actually do think – until proven otherwise – that ‘giving voice’ is tantamount to ‘co-optation’ in Modespeak. Or at least, Modespeakers can’t really tell the difference between the two states. (Maybe it’s just me, but I would like to go on the record as having said that.)

Finally, I like examples just as much as the next person, but there is no inherent virtue in proliferating examples, especially when it’s not clear what they have to do with each other – except the label ‘transdisciplinarity’, in this case. I mean this not only as a conceptual point. It has political implications as well. The proliferation of ‘agora’ in scientific decision-making is only superficially democratic. One of the cleverest ways the UK government has to do want it wants is to run multiple consensus conferences, focus groups, internet polls, town meetings, etc. Of course, each of these events reaches somewhat different conclusions, and so the government can decide what it wishes – all along claiming popular support.

Obviously, what Helga Nowotny claims is that (1) reliable knowledge is not enough - without giving more than very general opinions about the contemporary character of the relationship between science and society (so much for "generalizing"). She also explicitly claims (2) that socially robust knowledge will in some way represent better knowledge - mainly by argueing through an analogy about technical (i.e. applied) knowledge. But "better" regarding what standards? And does the analogy hold? I simply cannot help but take a stand with Steve Fuller here since I, too, feel that the blame about too much generalization has not been accurately directed.

A remark regarding the agora. I believe that what Steve has suggested was exactly that it remains an open question wether the concept of the agora that Helga Nowotny envisages will be able, in principle, to avoid preemption and containment. One of the more disconcerting characteristics in participatory experiences in knowledge production seems that, e.g., it often lacks basic procedural structures to ensure the representative participation of those concerned in any given area of research. Furthermore, much experience also seems to show, that solutions reached through participatory knowledge production not only are extremely resource-intensive but that it remains often unclear wether this format was actually able to contribute substantially to sustainable solutions.

To be clear: I am convinced that the application of participation in knowledge production can contribute positively to the development of science. But I am so far simply unconvinced regarding Nowotny's claim that it will play any substantial role in this development - or that it even should take on such a role.

1. Brussels and the de-privileging of the university: I don’t know what they like or not in Brussels, nor do I speak for them - whoever ‘they’ are. I fail to see why transdisciplinarity would de-privilege the university. Quite to the contrary, if more transdisciplinarity would be practiced inside, this would greatly boost universities. Or what exactly are their privileges?

2. I don’t understand why anything I said would ‘deny any special role for the university in resolving these problems or capturing the knowledge that is produced in the process’. Again, my intervention is an appeal also to universities to capture or re-capture their capacity in problem-solving, even if departemental lines have to be crossed or if you need to speak to people outside the university.

3. If you want to equate the university with a glorified car park, you may do so. I don’t. Universities are, as Steve puts it “in the business of producing knowledge as a ‘public good, which means (among other things) that whatever knowledge is produced is made as widely available as possible”. Agreed. But universities are not the only ones to produce knowledge, not even as a public good, nor do they hold a monopoly on it. And how will you make the knowledge produced widely available and to whom without engaging in a kind of agora-like behaviour and setting and without resorting to some kind of transdisciplinarity?

4. I did not realize that it is mandatory to mention power asymmetries everywhere, but Steve need to be only half-disappointed: they are to be found on p. 211 of Re-Thinking Sciene. Power does matter and who would deny it? But what follows from this observation? Orwell can be conjured up at any time, just as abuse and co-optation always remain possibilities. In fact, we might end up in a state of totalitarianism again. But I do not think that this will be brought about, because we ‘give voice’ to people who did not speak before or who do not have the means or access to articulate themselves.

Finally, you do not have to like ‘Modespeak’, Steve, but please, don’t give me ‘Oldspeak’.

Moreover, while acknowledging Steve’s point that the multiple meanings of transdisciplinarity might render it vague – hence, terminological muddle -- the phenomena at stake indeed complex, a realization that Basarab Nicolescu has done the most to teach us.

I don’t share Steve’s view that transdisciplinarity is “instinctively anti-university,” either, but do buy his argument about the necessity of institutionalization. In that vein, I’d like to invite members of this seminar to contribute examples of institutionalizing inclusiveness, openness, and kindred virutes outside the university in a forum we are presumably to be testing – the Internet. Are there electronic communities where ‘giving voice’ is not tantamount to ‘co-optation? New information technologies facilitate networking on an unprecedented scale, and in the name of this month’s topic. A search of the Internet reveals a multitude of websites using the descriptor "transdisciplinary." There are sites dedicated to learning assessment, arts education, distance education, mental health, rehabilitation, special education, children with multiple disabilities and pain management. The term also appears on sites for engineering problems, ecological economics, human population biology, language and thought, preparation for teamwork and collaboration, systems science, cybernetics and infomatics, and knowledge organization. Do they have any promise of transformative change or are they only minor and fleeting conversations?

Two sites, in particular, might provide a comparative test case. The first, the Centre International de Recherches et Etudes Transdisciplinaires (CIRET) is a vitual meeting space for specialists from different sciences and other domains of activity, including art, industry, and education. CIRET publishes a journal devoted to transdisciplinarity, disseminates results of UNESCO-sponsored international colloquia (including the First World Congress on Transdisciplinarity in Arrabida in 1994 and the 1997 Locarno Congress on “The Transdisciplinary Evolution of the University”), and presents theoretical works on the nature of transdisciplinarity and reports on practical developments in France, Spain, Romania, Brazil, and other countries. (). The second, the Swiss Academic Society of Environmental Research and Ecology (SAGUF), involves researchers and non-academic partners in transdisciplinary projects in Switzerland and abroad. SAGUFNET provides bibliography and information services, a forum for discussions, links to other pertinent sites, and an introduction to the topic of transdisciplinarity written by Christoph Küffer (http://www.transdisciplinarity.ch). Both SAGUFNET and CIRET are multi-lingual international electronic sites, so, to reiterate, provide a good tests of one of the questions we are to be exploring.

I agree that is not a „main function,“ but the history of the academy is replete with strong and sustained efforts to repress some forms of knowledge and their producers. Perhaps I misunderstand what you meant (and please correct me if I have), but I don’t see that as a "simple" application of norms to all claims, raising the questions of whether there are incommensurate claims and whether justification is not separate but inherent in any knowledge practice (akin to question raised by others about whether responsibility is inherent in science).

First, I’m not sure what Helga means by ‘Oldspeak’, but we’re all in serious trouble if talk of power asymmetries has become passe’ in Modespeak. My reference to ‘Brussels’ is about the buzzword-status of Modespeak in European science policy circles (including even the UK). Call it ‘memes’, except as several interlocutors have remarked, the distinctiveness of the spreading jargon is not matched by an equal clarity of the conveyed concepts.

This state-of-affairs is not accidental. There is an advantage to keeping the parameters of transdisciplinarity vague – and not simply because the world is a rapidly changing, heterogeneous place (when hasn’t it been?). Rather the language needs to be adaptive in a changing political environment. In the European context, there are many old social democrats trying to reinvent themselves as neo-liberals, and Modespeak is very good for that purpose, since its political horizons range from a pure contract-based, market-driven research agenda (neo-liberal) to a more traditional welfarist, socially responsible research agenda (social democrat).

In this respect, I find the radical-sounding rhetoric that Helga invokes in her responses somewhat misleading (e.g. ‘breaking the door open’), since the reality of transdisciplinarity on the ground tends to be much more accommodating, flexible, even pliable. Moreover, for all the rhetoric of transcending traditional limitations, especially in academia, Modespeakers don’t show a lot of interest in – or perhaps they believe it’s impossible to gauge – the overall effects of these multiple cross-cutting alliances, networks, etc. Is knowledge really flowing in some more equitable, democratic fashion, or is it more an opportunistic ‘capturing’ of knowledge by those who can?

For example, while I strongly endorse the use of consensus conferences and citizens juries, I also believe that they should be binding on legislators in some constitutionally defined fashion, with the possibility of future reversal, if the consequences of pursuing their decisions turn out to be negative. What I don’t endorse is the endless proliferation of ‘voicings’ that serve no clear political purpose than simply allowing the public to let off steam and allowing politicians convenient excuses to do whatever they want. Is innovation at the level of consultation matched by innovation at the level of decision-making?

Put it this way: The problem with letting a thousand flowers bloom is that some of them may turn out to be weeds and strangle the other flowers. But this is only a problem for gardeners and not seed merchants. I worry that like the Greek Sophists, who did their best business in the agora, Modespeakers are more merchants than gardeners.

I thank Steve Fuller for directing our attention to the challenge of socially relevant problems that the academic world has to face – but often doesn’t. Indeed, I think these are the kind of problems that should be the starting point for any knowledge production that is intended to be transdisciplinary, as it is the most urgent problems that cannot be solved by one discipline alone. To put it differently, transdisciplinary knowledge production must be sensitive to social relevance. This seems to be a different notion of our key word than the one oriented at the “context of application” Helga Nowotny proposes.

You can use “modespeak” to talk about a lot of sympathetic things: giving voice to the yet unheard, giving those affected by the products of science a share in decision-making, opening up borderlines, building networks, ... You cannot use “modespeak” to talk about all this as desirable ends. However, all this is desirable and even necessary “to produce a better science”. If that was what a considerable part of academic knowledge production really was like (which still remains to be shown by the advocates of the Mode 2-thesis), society would surely be better off. If that is not, why are there no normative considerations on the future of the academy and its relation to society? Transdisciplinarity, after all, is a normative notion as well.
Seen from this point of view, “modespeak” is wishful thinking without talking about the wishes.

As a site for the “normative type” of transdisciplinarity oriented at social relevance, the university is best suited (although there might be better sites to come). Universities, with their combination of research and liberal education on a background of a multitude of academic fields, provide in principle an ideal basis for the production and dissemination of transdisciplinary knowledge. In this interpretation of transdisciplinary knowledge as a societal need, it is the most precious public good the universities can produce.
In practice, modern universities face a host of serious structural challenges:
- internal differentiation, partly effected by the demand for vocational training for a highly specialized job market, makes it harder to teach academic disciplines and necessitates new forms of self-governance; - student numbers have long exceeded the universities’ capacities;
- competition for resources favours applied research, and in consequence forces the universities to restructure their curricula;
- etc.
All this is of ambivalent value to knowledge production and dissemination. However, I suspect that these developments, taken to their very consequences, might impair the function of the university as a site for producing socially relevant knowledge that ignores disciplinary borders. That means, it would impair its function to counterbalance one-track social change that decreases the ability of our society to cope with the multi-faceted problems it faces. Again, Steve is right to ask how the challenges that universities are forced to cope with, relate to the changing structures of knowledge production described by the Mode 2-thesis. If there is indeed a positive correlation then he has been right in warning us about the ambivalent nature of mode 2-science and the threat it poses to the integrity of the universities. It seems to be time to pose an old question anew: What idea of the university do we have?

First, it is a matter of personal style and temperament. I do not like insinuations and the agressiveness they carry, since each insinuation is slippery, giving rise to some subtle, only half-stated accusation. Then, I either have to defend myself against something that has never clearly been stated, nor has it explicitly been raised against me (in this case, why should I defend myself) or I ignore it and will be seen as arrogant. But this is merely a difference in personal style.

More substantively, I came to the conclusion that the disagreement is about thinking in dichotomies or not. Maybe “Modespeak” is a way to overcome dichotomies. For Steve, you are either a ‘gardener’ or a ‘seed merchant’, and he leaves no doubt what is the morally preferable choice. You are either for ‘universities’ or you are ‘de-privileging’ them. You are for the commercialization of research, or you are defending the very idea of science. You are either an old social democrat trying to reinvent yourself as a neo-liberal, or you are an old traditional welfarist with a social responsible research agenda. You are for ‘Brussels’ or against ‘Brussels’, for reasons that, as Steve tells us, have to do with the “buzzword status of Modespeak in European science policy circles”. The underlying pattern of thinking in dichotomies is always the same: you are either for us, or against us. You are either on the ‘good’ side or you belong to the other, derogatory category. This is what I call “Oldspeak”. It may be enjoyable up to a point, but I think it carries some grave risks.

Yes, it is heterogeneous, complex and messy. It keeps on changing, and so do the circumstances in which we employ language. Yes, power asymmetries matter, but we have to take them into account and move on nevertheless. Yes, we should worry about possible abuses and threats to the democratic order, but I also believe that we have an obligation not only to warn, but also to act in whatever limited environment our actions might make a difference, on however small a scale.

If, to take Steve’s example, consensus conferences and other forms of encouraging cross-cutting alliances merely provide politicians with convenient excuses to do whatever they want, why do we not speak up publicly as social scientists or STS persons and act accordingly? Many of these “endless proliferations of voicings” would not proliferate at all, were it not for the active professional involvement on the part of a considerable number of social scientists who gain their living this way, probably on short-term contracts which they therefore have good reason to denounce.

But if we, as social scientists, had the courage to speak up publicly that these exercises are only a waste of public funding and a political scam, the general public, the media, research councils and politicians would rightly expect us to come up with alternative proposals. If they consist in making them “binding on legislators”, fine, but then we will first need to consult with lawyers and politicians alike. We would have to engage in some kind of transdisciplinary exchange, defining jointly what the problem is, what our experience as social scientists with these many experiments has been and argue for another solution that will hopefully prove to be more socially robust than the present fight between “weeds” and the flowers they strangle.

Maybe, this makes me sound like an old-fashioned social democrat, nostalgic for long passé ideas of social engineering. But I am only trying to find the consistency in Steve’s arguments. Mine have been stated, maybe too vaguely, in “The Potential of Transdisciplinarity” , in my other writings and in my replies in this debate. I do not have ‘the solution’, but I have strong ideas about the direction in which I think we should go.

First, I don't see an inherent problem with postulating binary oppositions, their harshness notwithstanding. After all, I seem to recall that Mode 1 vs. Mode 2 is a binary that managed to get this entire discussion off the ground. And I didn't invent it!

I must say, though, overall I am pleasantly surprised by the general tenor of Helga's remarks, which include a denunciation of the 'endless voicings' and a restatement of social democratic ideals, relatively unadulterated by neo-liberalism. I am surprised because the short-term contract research environment that we both condemn – in which these voicings flourish -- is what I think most people think of as 'transdisciplinary' research. In this connection, I am surprised that Helga in her capacity as spokesperson (I hesitate to put it more strongly) for transdisciplinarity has not done more to distance herself from these developments, with which her work is often associated.

I myself do criticize this work in print – along with providing some kind of analysis of the situation (e.g. Fuller 2000a: chap. 5; Fuller 2000b: chap. 7; Fuller and Collier 2003: New Introduction). But I take the point that it is necessary also to become involved with constructive proposals. I have been a strong advocate of consensus conferences in the UK, often against resistance of social science colleagues who basically want to pursue the 'endless voicings' paradigm (Fuller 2001). I have also been supportive of Japanese STS colleagues with a similar agenda. Peter Ploeger from Bielefeld, who has recently entered the discussion, is someone who has actually tried to marry concerns about the future of the university with the consensus conference format.

Helga is exactly right that the issue of institutionalization eventually brings us to issues concerning lawyers and politicians. And this is often the main obstacle because they people don't want their hands tied -- or at least we have not found a way of persuading them that it's in their interest to have their hands tied! Instead, they'd like to see consensus conferences as an all-purpose social technology, a kind of glorified focus group. As long as our social science colleagues encourage this perspective, we'll have an uphill struggle.

Fuller, Steve. (2000a). The Governance of Science. Milton Keynes UK: Open University Press.

Fuller, Steve. (2000b). Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fuller, Steve. (2001). 'Con or Commitment?' Science and Public Affairs. (December), pp. 22-23.

Fuller, Steve and James Collier (2003). Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge. 2nd edn. (Orig. 1993). Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Goldgar, Anne. (1995). Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680-1750. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Je suis d’accord avec l’auteur sur le fait que la connaissance est transgressive et que le potentiel de la transdisciplinarité consiste a introduire de nouveaux liens entre producteurs - et utilisateurs – de connaissances. La considération de nouveaux paradigmes métaplastiques au sein desquels les différentes formes de perception seraient prises en compte irait dans le sens de cette transgression. Tel parait-être le cas des réseaux art-cognition ou observant les comportements émergents des systèmes complexes. Tel est aussi l’enjeu des sciences cognitives cherchant a comprendre la nature de la conscience. Toutefois, la pratique interdisciplinaire, telle qu’elle est présentée, ne peut répondre stricto-sensu à cette attente dans la mesure où les niveaux de réalité visés ne me semblent pas correspondre à ceux qui permettraient d’ébaucher une ascèse vers la transgression.

De fait, le préfixe trans signifie implicitement adopter une perspective transversale, se saisir de ce qui se situe entre et au-delà de, ne pas quitter le lien générique qui permet d'édifier des ponts naturels entre les disciplines et aller vers une transposition des grilles de lecture de la réalité. Cette approche de la transdisciplinarité distinguant les niveaux d’organisation des niveaux de réalité et intégrant le tiers-inclus (qui n’est pas un ‘third attribute of Mode-2’) a été clairement explicitée dans le manifeste de Basarab Nicolescu (http://perso.club-internet.fr/nicol/ciret/index.htm). Je ne doute pas que l’objectif de Helga Novotny soit comme le nôtre d’aller dans le sens d’un décloisonnement des disciplines. Les processus co-évolutifs qu’elle cite ou encore ce que René Thom désigne comme un principe général tendant à universaliser le concept ‘mathématique’ de transversalité en sont de bons exemples.

C’est pourquoi nous devons, en aval d'une réflexion épistémologique, aller ensemble vers la mise en place de schémas auto-cohérents observés dans nos disciplines respectives, les articuler à des modèles communs, puis valider ces prédictions par une série d'expériences interactives réalisées dans et entre ces disciplines. Ainsi, nous pourrons ouvrir, par la superposition de champs expérimentaux concrets, des voies de recherche nouvelles permettant d'appréhender les phénomènes dans leur globalité, sans pour autant renier la spécialisation de chacun.

While I applaud this recent interest in transdisciplinarity from what I have read of the discussion on this site so far it regrettably seems to me that transdisciplinarity is being regarded as just the latest in a series of fleetingly fashionable concepts. There is nothing in Helga Novotny's presentation of transdisciplinarity, for example, or in any of Julia Klein's writing, which indicates that unlike disciplinary, interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches, the transdisciplinary approach actually demands (and if used as it should be inevitably results in) ontological change on the part of the researcher. In what way? Using the transdisciplinary approach requires that the long forgotten Subject be included and the implications and effects of that are endless.

Of course even my making a statement like the one I just made in a context like this is considered completely out of bounds. Indeed, it is out of bounds. However, hasn't Novotny remarked on the "transgressive" character shared by knowledge and transdisciplinarity? Transdisciplinarity does have a transgressive character which is precisely what makes so many persons within the academy extremely uncomfortable with it and why discussions of it are so frequently limited to talking about its implications in terms of things like the distribution of knowledge (directional—i.e., from the top down or not, and otherwise—e.g. across various groups such as "laypeople" and "academics.") as though knowledge was some kind of commodity, some object one could purchase or obtain). The examples of transgressiveness that Novotny offered—that of the "resurgence of NGOs" and the "other ways in which various kinds of stakeholders organise in shaping social reality" do absolutely nothing to convey the profoundly radical character of transdisciplinarity.

These are some thoughts off the top of my head as it were, but I fervently hope that they will function to spark some meaningful discussion about the issues I have raised.

Finally, since most of the persons who will be reading this do not know who I am, let me say by way of introduction that I am a historian of religions who specializes in esotericism, who encountered transdisciplinarity ten years ago, and who subsequently (and as a direct result) abandoned her hitherto relentless climb up the academic ladder as well as her efforts to "establish" herself in the academy as yet another "academic entrepreneur." Instead, I ended up moving to Istanbul where I work as an independent scholar and writer. I am utterly devoted to "learning how to "conjugate the verb 'to be,'" as Basarab Nicolescu once put it.

Karen-Claire Voss Former Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies San Jose State University, San Jose, California Independent Scholar and Writer, Istanbul Member of CIRET

Transdisciplinary knowledge production advanced by Basarab Nicolescu is not based on observation but on a vision. This does not make Nicolescu’s concept any less worthy. But in CIRET's Moral Project (1987 modified 1999), Nicolescu refers to transdisciplinarity as “the return to a Golden Age”. But is not this a utopian concept? And CIRET defines transdisciplinarity as opposed to all globalising projects while seeming to promote it as a global meta-narrative. I genuinely admire Nicolescu’s concept of the included middle to break the disciplinary bind of classical scientific logic, but the rest seems most inappropriate in a post-modern world and may explain why Nicolescu unwittingly attracts a fringe following which he has seen necessary to reject in Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (2002).

I am unable to agree with Karen-Claire Voss’ assertion that Helga Nowotny ignores the “subjective”. I regard both New Production and Rethinking Science as excellent ethnographies. The analysis of observations in Rethinking Science especially does not convey the detached objectivity of the quantitative researcher. Rather, we are provided with insight into the emerging dominant assumptions and practices of new knowledge production. Our understanding is enriched by the “subjective” robustness of her examples. Certainly, the detailed complexity of Mode 2 society conveys the sense of radical transdisciplinarity. Further, in The Potential of Transdisciplinarity she states “it is a portentous, and not a trivial, change”, and warns of criticism likely to be encountered when practising transdisciplinarity aligned with, what I interpret as, the ontological change on the part of the researcher. While Karen-Claire Voss might respond that I have missed the point of “the profoundly radical nature of transdisciplinarity”, surely, in a post-modern world, we can live with more than one reality of what constitutes transdisciplinarity. For me, the fundamental difference between observed and visionary transdisciplinarity is that the former moves within the context of what is occurring while the later moves within the context of what should occur. I can work with both.

In 2000, I was approached to assist in the formulation of a new doctorate degree based on Mode 2 knowledge production and transdisciplinary research. I am now in the enviable position of being able to observe transdisciplinary thinking and research in application. I doubt it is possible to embrace all 8,530+ disciplines (Crane and Small 1992) in transdisciplinary pursuit. Reality necessitates the unification of knowledge across disciplines relevant to a particular context.

The contributions of Nowotny, Klein, Nicolescu and others have forged a radical reconstruction of knowledge production and transdisciplinarity here far from Europe, North America and Istanbul. More will surely follow. Embrace it.