what does “trans-” mean in “transdisciplinarity”?
while being at chengdu, i had an interesting conversation with ranulph glanville (he is vice-president of the international academy of systems and cybernetic sciences). it was about the meaning of the term “transdisciplinarity”. i had suggested that a transdisciplinary endeavour includes stable relationships between the parties involved and that these relationships would make the parties change, while otherwise, that is in case of ephemeral interaction, the parties wouldn’t change and the term “interdisciplinarity” would be a proper signification. ranulph said that “trans-” in “transdisciplinarity” means in his view crossing the borders of one discipline towards another discipline. that’s right. but the important point is how that crossover is realised. is it a one-to-one translation? or is it rather a transformation – a process in which the disciplines in question jointly construct common grounds as kind of a metadiscipline such that each relation from one discipline to the other is conveyed via the metalevel? in the latter case, the parties subject themselves to a “third party”. they give up some individuality to become part of a shared system and gain mutual understanding they wouldn’t have otherwise.
ranulph defines “interdisciplinarity” in the following way: all the parties involved have got advantages or they produce a common product. i’d like to draw some distinction here: in the first case, everything depends on whether the parties have got advantages that might be ephemeral (as in many online communities of interest, communities of practice) or not. if they are ephemeral, i’m inclined to label them “interdisciplinary” as ranulph does. however, if they are not ephemeral, if they are sustained, if they are synergisms the parties lock in to, then they are systemic because the parties entered a system, which is a quite different situation. wouldn’t it be better to have another term for such a relationship?
ranulph made an example for the second case. a couple gets a baby born. the baby is the common product. that’s a good example. in my opinion, by producing that common product the couple builds up a new system by which they will undergo transformation. also in that case another term than “inter-” is requested to fit. “inter-” would rather signify a one-night stand, wouldn’t it?
thus my plea for using “transdisciplinarity”. it can neatly denote what franics heylighen et al. call a metasystem transition, if applied to disciplines.
November 5th, 2010 at 10:32 pm
Dear Wolfgang,
I would brand those mentioned ephemeral relations as multi-disciplinary. Concerning trans-D, there are indeed two traditions or poles in the usage of the term: as integration of research in some problem solving tasks; or as unity of knowledge. The first is more used in German speaking countries. In Göttingen, a conference was held in 2003 to elucidate the different usages of multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinarity and many different uses were referred.
To my understanding, if no change is produced in the methods and knowledge ground I would term it multi-D. That is the case of so many projects in what has been called big-science, for instance, astronautics (I believe there may be an interest from those holding the power to instrumentally use the knowledge to produce what they are interested in, but controlling the limited understanding of each party so they can use it again). Let us consider on the other side cybernetics as a successful case of trans-disciplinarity, indeed involved in the astronautics project. We can find here some kind of agreement considering the outer behaviour of the systems, however each involved discipline held a different understanding about the inner. This could be a reason for the lack of success on the understanding of intelligence or intentionality, despite of the success on the self-regulation mechanisms, as well as the disagreement among different constructivist schools when the boundaries of the outer behaviour was overpassed.
In the inter-disciplinarity, as I understand it, there is an endeavour to grasp the understanding of the others, while keeping the own point of view to some extend. It assumes a limitation on the vision held by each other, since the blind angles may vary from one viewpoint to the other. Thus, understanding the other implies changing one’s viewpoint (i.e. empathising). This might bring a change in the former viewpoint when one who has understood other viewpoint tries to comes back to the original one. The complete return is not possible because the child is there, and so on…