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.
