1.1. Arguments for interdisciplinary research
Interdisciplinarity has two main areas of value, one is pragmatic, the other epistemological.
The pragmatic aspect lies in solving complex real-world problems, minimising unintended side effects and creating new narratives to observe a phenomena. The complexity of situated problems requires diverse input.
Interdisciplinarity is generally recognized as a key technique for generating new knowledge and solving hard problems in emerging and changing technological, environmental, social contexts, such as global communications, ubiquitous computing, emerging digital cultures and their legal and political aspects, global warming and sustainability problems.
As with the pragmatic aspect, in the epistemological aspect, interdisciplinarity helps to solve boundary problems and has a mediating function between disciplines. The epistemological aspect involves negotiation of the relationships between disciplines and interrogation of the coherence of assumptions and methods.
Interdisciplinarity encourages reflexive consideration of disciplines. Philip Agre called this Critical Technical Practice. It reveals operational metaphors and methodological errors and exposes hidden assumptions of disciplinary cultures by denaturalization and interrogating operational metaphors and structuring narratives. It can help find disciplinary lacunae and extend disciplinary research scope/paradigms. It allows mediation between disciplines and helps get into the gaps between the so-called ‘silos’. The ‘silo’ metaphor, commonly deployed in commentaries in English, sees disciplines as rising like columns over time. As they get higher, they both reinforce their own conventions and cross communication between silos is reduced. Niklas Luhmann explained interdisciplinarity in terms of the cybernetic notion of the observer of the second order. Someone who does not see just the object through the eyes of the discipline but who, thanks to his distance, sees and can reflect on the object, the discipline, and on the bonds between them, which may transpire to be questionable.
Interdisciplinarity in this case would mean to create a position beyond disciplines. Roland Barthes identified a similar condition when he said - “In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a 'subject' (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists of creating a new object, which belongs to no one.”
Applying the methods of one discipline to the material of another can produce valuable productive outcomes or results of interdisciplinary research. In his work Cognition in the Wild, Ed Hutchins’ approach to distributed cognition opened up cognitive science by challenging its methodologies to account for problems outside the normal problem set. In the social sciences, mixing methods from anthropology, social psychology and sociology has contributed to important epistemological turns.
Academic research (often characterised as the ‘Ivory Tower’) is perceived to be isolated and not responsive to real (public, citizen) problems. “Real life” is about real life problems which may not stop at disciplinary boundaries. Interdisciplinarity opens inquiry to diverse participation, as indicated in the concerns of citizen science initiatives.
