Olivier Boulnois argues that a radical shift occurred in metaphysics at the end of the thirteenth century, a shift completed and systematized by Duns Scotus. The shift concerns being, the subject of metaphysics: from God to a universal exhibited by God and creatures alike . This shift went hand in hand with an account of signification as representation: signs, rather than being in some sense identical with the things they signify, merely represent these things. According to Boulnois—and this is where (...) the thesis becomes original—the basic motivation for the shift in opinion on the nature of metaphysics lay in the insight of Roger Bacon that spoken and written signs signify things directly, without the mediation of concepts. This means that there is no place for an analogy of being, since “being” is a sign either of things that fall under one concept or of things that together fall under many different concepts . “Being”—the object of thought—is identified by Scotus as non nihil, whatever is logically possible, and in this sense is univocal to the Aristotelian categories and to God. But identifying being in this way means that metaphysics does not restrict its study to the actually existent. It studies anything that is logically possible. But the logically possible is whatever can be represented: so the representable is in some sense the subject of metaphysics. Concepts are signs of the representable, and thought becomes a sort of semantics, a mental language of representational concepts whose objects are the representable, the logically possible. So ultimately the univocity of being can be traced too to the insights about representation: the status of being as the representable entails the univocity of being. Knowledge of the representable considered independently of actual existence is abstraction; knowledge that attends to the actual existence of the representable is intuition—though in both cases to know something is for a representation of it to inhere in the mind. The ultimately representable object is the divine essence, which somehow contains in itself all other representable objects—it contains “ideas” of everything other than the divine essence. As representable objects, however, these ideas depend for their existence on the divine essence: to this extent, God's mental contents are caused totally by himself. God does not require representations in order to cause; he causes the representable objects and thus causes his representations of them.Clearly, if Boulnois is right, the sorts of innovation usually associated with Wolff can be traced not merely to Suarez but in fact to Scotus and his contemporaries. And the relation with Kant is obvious enough, though the medievals would been unhappy with the Kantian twist—the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal.The importance of the book in the history of science is to some extent tangential: in this case, more a matter of circumscribing areas of disciplinary competence and relevance—determining the domain of physics by showing what metaphysics pertains to. And there are some faults: a failure to engage with the latest Scotist scholarship on the question of the relation between the possible and the thinkable and, likewise, a failure to consider with sufficient clarity the extent to which Scotus really agrees that spoken signs signify extramental reality directly. But overall Être et représentation is a significant achievement, essential reading for anyone interested in the history of metaphysics. (shrink)

This essay situates “singularity” at the heart of the power dynamics operative in contemporary pedagogy and the system supporting it. More than merely academic learning, indeed, “school” here denotes not only the range of disciplinary authorities at work within the classroom and the educational system at large but also discursive obedience to knowledge. Supported by close readings of Arendt and Derrida, this paper thus argues that nothing less than the formation of identity is at stake in “school.” What are (...) the boundaries, limits, and conditions of possibility for a student’s invention of his or her own singularity within an institution and curriculum that, at the same time, demands obedience to authority? This paradoxical formation of identity within the constrictive demands of authority constitutes the primary task of thinking the “invention of singularity” at the heart of schooling in conjunction with democracy, language, vocation, and ideology. (shrink)

During the past decades, research collaboration between researchers from different disciplines has become more frequent. However, there is a need to look into the generic modalities and challenges. The article explores a series of potential obstructions to cross-disciplinary collaboration of methodological and epistemological nature. Furthermore, a number of contextual, inhibiting factors are outlined. As means of overcoming the obstacles, the importance of mutual knowledge, allocation of adequate time and conducive research management is emphasised. New teams may benefit from (...) tutoring by facilitators, who can help to make problem areas explicit and negotiate solutions. Owing to the training background of the author, most of the examples are drawn from the interface between biomedicine/natural science and applied medical anthropology. However, the issues raised basically apply to all sorts of cross-disciplinary research collaboration in various combinations. (shrink)

Philosophical dialogue has the power to improve interdisciplinary scientific research. The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI) conducts workshops that foster philosophical dialogue among interdisciplinary researchers. This chapter focuses on 20 of these workshops, all of which used the Toolbox STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) instrument and were conducted with interdisciplinary research teams of scientists. We analyze data from some of these workshops and demonstrate that philosophical dialogues conducted using the Toolbox method have two salutary effects. First, they lead to a (...) significant increase in belief formation about philosophical topics relevant to interdisciplinary science. Scientists sometimes do not have preconceived commitments on issues in philosophy of science, and Toolbox workshops tend to prompt them to adopt views on these topics. Second, these philosophical …. (shrink)

It is argued that core areas of philosophy can benefit from reflection on cross-disciplinary research (CDR). We start by giving a brief account of CDR, describing its variability and some of the ways in which philosophers can interact with it. We then provide an argument in principle for the conclusion that CDR is philosophically fecund, arguing that since CDR highlights fundamental differences among disciplinary research worldviews, it can be used to motivate new philosophical problems and supply new (...) insights into old problems. We close by providing an argument by example that uses the epistemology of peer disagreement to establish the potential of CDR for core philosophical areas. With this argument, we aim to demonstrate how the complex research contexts that CDR affords can point the way toward important avenues of epistemological research by highlighting potential limitations of key epistemological components, such as peerage and uniqueness. (shrink)

In recent decades there has been increasing demand for and considerable efforts to conduct cross-disciplinary research. However, assessment of research quality in such endeavours still is often based on mono-disciplinary criteria and not seldom carried out by reviewers without strong cross-disciplinary experience. The authors suggest a two-pronged approach to cross-disciplinary research evaluation. One part should comprise an individual review of all the disciplines involved based on their mono-disciplinary sets of criteria. The other (...) part should be a separate evaluation of the cross-disciplinary aspects based on the review of “problem formulation”, “integration and scope of the disciplines”, “parts and the whole”, “practical managerial aspects” and “the applied aspects”. The pros and cons of implementing this approach in a stepwise manner or simultaneously is discussed. It is suggested that funding agencies develop more fair sets of review procedures for cross-disciplinary research and show willingness to allocate extra funds and time to such forms of research that sometimes are regarded as relatively more “risky” than conventional mono-disciplinary types. (shrink)

How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized (...) in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women's or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to investigate how patterns of collaboration and scholarly independence are related to early stage researchers’ development in two multidisciplinary learning environments at a Swedish university. Based on interviews with leaders, supervisors, doctoral students, and post docs, results show how early stage researchers’ development is conditioned by their relative positions in time and space. Through the theoretical notions of ‘epistemic living space’ and ‘developmental networks’, four ways of experiencing the multidisciplinary learning environment were distinguished. Overall, (...) the environments provided a world of opportunities, where the epistemic living space entailed many possibilities for cross-disciplinary collaboration and development of scholarly independence among peers. However, depending on the members’ relative positions in time and space, this world became an alien world for the post docs who had been forced to become “over-independent” and find collaborators elsewhere. Moreover, it became an avoided world for absent mono-disciplinary supervisors and students who embodied “non-collective independence”, away from the environments’ community. By contrast, a joint world emerged for doctoral students located in the environment, which promoted their “independent positioning” and collaborative ambitions. Thus, early stage researchers’ collaboration and development of scholarly independence were optimised in a converged learning space, where the temporal and spatial conditions were integrated and equally conducive for learning. Based on these results, the authors provide suggestions for how to improve the integration of scholars who tend to develop away from the community because of their temporal and spatial positions. (shrink)

In this article we argue that philosophy can facilitate improvement in cross-disciplinary science. In particular, we discuss in detail the Toolbox Project, an effort in applied epistemology that deploys philosophical analysis for the purpose of enhancing collaborative, cross-disciplinary scientific research through improvements in cross-disciplinary communication. We begin by sketching the scientific context within which the Toolbox Project operates, a context that features a growing interest in and commitment to cross-disciplinary research (CDR). We (...) then develop an argument for the leading idea behind this effort, namely, that philosophical dialogue can improve cross-disciplinary science by effecting epistemic changes that lead to better group communication. On the heels of this argument, we describe our approach and its output; in particular, we emphasize the Toolbox instrument that generates philosophical dialogue and the Toolbox workshop in which that dialogue takes place. Together, these constitute a philosophical intervention into the life of CDR teams. We conclude by considering the philosophical implications of this intervention. (shrink)

While empirical studies of research ethics and integrity are increasingly common, few have aimed at national scope, and even fewer at current results from Central and Eastern Europe. This article introduces the results of the first national research integrity survey in Estonia, which included all research-performing organisations in Estonia, was inclusive of all disciplines and all levels of experience. A web-based survey was developed and carried out in Estonia with a call sent to all accredited Estonian research institutions. The results (...) indicate that the vast majority (89%) of respondents consider research ethics and integrity issues important and view falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism (FFPs) as the most severe forms of misconduct. Self-reporting of FFPs is generally comparable to levels published in other studies (6.2%). Gift authorship (41%) and hampering the work of a colleague (32%) were problematic practices most noticed among colleagues. At the same time, two of the noticed questionable research practices (QRPs) – salami-slicing and misuse of research funding – were seen as less severe, hinting at the existence of counter-norms that career advancement rules and structural factors like funding policies may encourage. The availability of research ethics and integrity guidelines was considered good. Ethical aspects of studying potentially stigmatising data in a very small research community are discussed in the article and results are analysed through counter-norms and normative dissonance frames. (shrink)

Meeting grand challenges requires responses that constructively combine multiple forms of expertise, both academic and non-academic; that is, it requires cross-disciplinary integration. But just what is cross-disciplinary integration? In this paper, we supply a preliminary answer by reviewing prominent accounts of cross-disciplinary integration from two literatures that are rarely brought together: cross-disciplinarity and philosophy of biology. Reflecting on similarities and differences in these accounts, we develop a framework that integrates their insights—integration as a (...) generic combination process the details of which are determined by the specific contexts in which particular integrations occur. One such context is cross-disciplinary research, which yields cross-disciplinary integration. We close by reflecting on the potential applicability of this framework to research efforts aimed at meeting grand challenges. (shrink)

This article discusses the ethical responsibilities that psychology faculty have when psychological information is seriously misrepresented or psychological techniques are misued by nonpsychology faculty. General values derived from the American Psychological Association's (APA) ethical principles are identified and reviewed. The APA ethical code recommends that psychologists limit the misrepresentation of psychological information and protect students from the misuse of psychological techniques. Examples from my experience are presented to illustrate these ethical principles and responsibilities.

Four principal papers and a total of 43 peer commentaries on the evolutionary origins of morality. To what extent is human morality the outcome of a continuous development from motives, emotions and social behaviour found in nonhuman animals? Jerome Kagan, Hans Kummer, Peter Railton and others discuss the first principal paper by primatologists Jessica Flack and Frans de Waal. The second paper, by cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm, synthesizes social science and biological evidence to support his theory of how our hominid (...) ancestors became moral. In the third paper philosopher Elliott Sober and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argue that an evolutionary understanding of human nature allows sacrifice for others and ultimate desires for another's good. Finally Brian Skyrms argues that game theory based on adaptive dynamics must join the social scientist's use of rational choice and classical game theory to explain cooperation. (shrink)

This article provides a review of scholarly approaches to assessing the impact of certification standards for sustainability. While we observe that some theoretical advances have afforded a better understanding of the potential impacts of adopting such standards, we also find that progress has been constrained due to a strong emphasis on assessing impact via linear causal pathways. This linear focus on the net effects for single stakeholders, such as farmers and producers, local communities and ecosystems, falls short of adequately capturing (...) the broader impact of certifications across social and ecological dimensions. Inspired by theories on complex systems thinking, we present a framework based on a systems-based impact logic that better captures and assesses the impacts of certification standards within broader social-ecological systems. Our framework can be used as a heuristic to design impact-related studies and assess the impact of certification standards across disciplinary vantage points and empirical contexts. (shrink)

The historical forces of war and migration impacted heavily on the disciplinary locations, practitioners, and structures of sexology and psychoanalysis that had developed in the first decades of the 20th century. By the late 1940s, the US was fast becoming the world centre of each of these prominent fields within the modern human sciences. During these years, the work of Alfred C. Kinsey and his team became synonymous with a distinctly North American brand of empirical sex research. This article (...) offers the most nuanced account to date of the shifting relationship between these two fields in the late 1940s to mid 1950s. It argues that this was more collaborative and mutually influential than previous historians have assumed, even as, following the publication of the first ‘Kinsey report’, tensions grew between the Indiana team and the conservative brand of psychoanalysis that by this stage dominated 1950s North American psychiatry. A keen sense of professional competitiveness accelerated the growing split between these two fields, as Kinsey’s team developed a distinctly modern, technologized brand of statistically oriented sexology that contrasted with the older patient case history, and assumed a very different approach to conservative analysts on ideas of homosexuality and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour. Yet this story of divergence is also tempered through consideration of other aspects of ‘situated knowledge’ such as religion and gender identity, even as accounts of cross-disciplinary competitiveness are expanded by contrasting Kinsey’s positions on psychoanalysis with those of contemporaries such as Harry Benjamin. (shrink)

Anthropogenic climate change has become a hot button issue in the scientific, economic, political, and ethical sectors. While the science behind climate change is clear, responses in the economic and political realms have been unfulfilling. On the economic front, companies have marketed themselves as pioneers in the quest to go green while simultaneously engaging in environmentally destructive practices and on the political front, politicians have failed to make any significant global progress. I argue that climate change needs to be framed (...) as an ethical issue to make serious progress towards the path to a sustainable human civilization. In an effort to motivate the urgency needed to confront climate change, I argue that climate change seriously affects human beings living here and now, and if one cares about unnecessarily harming fellow innocent living human beings, then one should care about one’s own environmental impact related to climate change. Since this argument does not depend upon any specific philosophical, religious, or ethical tradition but applies regardless of one’s particular background, I hope to induce genuine concern among all human beings regarding this issue. (shrink)

This chapter sums up the new state of the cross-disciplinary art in Andean prehistory, as collectively represented by the foregoing chapters. Progress and new perspectives are explored first on key individual questions. Who, for instance, were the Incas, and whence and when did they come to Cuzco? How and when did Quechua, too, reach Cuzco, as well as its furthest-flung outposts in north-west Argentina, Ecuador, and northern Peru? The scope is then broadened to overall scenarios for how the (...) main Andean language families might correlate in time and space with archaeological horizons that could best account for their dispersals. Four basic hypotheses have emerged, whose respective strengths and weaknesses are assessed in turn: a traditional ‘Wari as Aymara’ model, revised and defended; alternative proposals of ‘Wari as both Aymara and Quechua’, or ‘both Chavín and Wari as Quechua’; and the most radical new departure, ‘Wari as Quechua, Chavín as Aymara’. (shrink)

One of the important aspects of recent aesthetics is its focus on cross-disciplinary approaches. This implies that, although claims to generality and objectivity continue to be made, no single practice, science, or approach is able to provide absolute evidential support for arguments and claims. Aesthetics as a critical enterprise, therefore, is open to a plurality of explanations. As a result, art becomes more than another object of scientific or philosophical inquiry. It becomes a model for philosophical practice that (...) can complement or compete with dominant scientific paradigms. However, such aesthetic practice must respond to at least two grounds for skepticism: that a turn to aesthetics involves withdrawal from either critical and rigorous thinking or from social action and life. By discussing three core themes relevant for recent debates across the fields of philosophy, art history/theory and art pratice we would like to show how these concerns, while serious, can be taken up by aesthetics. These themes are: 1. the issue of validity (motivated by inquiries into the peculiar validity of aesthetic judgments); 2. the issue of subjectivity (motivated by the stipulated ‘special link’ between aesthetics and the human subject); and the political dimension of aesthetics (highlighted by the political implications of pluralist approaches to aesthetics, such as the need for negotiation and appeal). (shrink)

In recent decades there has been increasing demand for and considerable efforts to conduct cross-disciplinary research. However, assessment of research quality in such endeavours still is often based on mono-disciplinary criteria and not seldom carried out by reviewers without strong cross-disciplinary experience. The authors suggest a two-pronged approach to cross-disciplinary research evaluation. One part should comprise an individual review of all the disciplines involved based on their mono-disciplinary sets of criteria. The other (...) part should be a separate evaluation of the cross-disciplinary aspects based on the review of “problem formulation”, “integration and scope of the disciplines”, “parts and the whole”, “practical managerial aspects” and “the applied aspects”. The pros and cons of implementing this approach in a stepwise manner or simultaneously is discussed. It is suggested that funding agencies develop more fair sets of review procedures for cross-disciplinary research and show willingness to allocate extra funds and time to such forms of research that sometimes are regarded as relatively more “risky” than conventional mono-disciplinary types. (shrink)

Charles Darwin's curiosity had a remarkable childlike enthusiasm driven by an almost compulsive appetite for a constant process of discovery, which he never satiated despite his many voyages. He would puzzle about the smallest things, from the wonders of barnacles to the different shapes, colours and textures of the beetles which he obsessively collected, from flowers and stems to birds, music and language, and would dedicate years to understanding the potential significance of everything he saw. Darwin's findings and theories relied (...) heavily on that same curiosity, on seeking and answering questions, however long these would take to clarify. His son Francis Darwin often recalls how "he would ask himself 'now what do you want to say' and his answer written down would often disentangle the confusion". In fact, "disentangling confusions" seems to have been the driving force behind Darwin's scientific pursuits, as he was struck with bewilderment when contemplating the luxuriousness of life. It was also the impetus for this book. The true implications of Darwin's legacy remain as controversial to the critics of our time as they were to his contemporaries. Darwin's impact within and beyond the biological sciences is both daunting and exhilarating, and attests to the need for an interdisciplinary approach by remaining a challenge to many scholars in the most diverse fields. The recent revival of his theories has opened a Pandora's box of different theoretical studies that are particularly receptive to exploring new and exciting angles of research. (shrink)

In setting a framework for the papers that follow, I have explored some of the major characteristics of disciplines and the factors that breed ethnocentrism among disciplines, considered what factors can lead researchers to cross disciplinary boundaries, and explored the kinds of conceptual as well as social and institutional products that result from cross-disciplinary work. While drawing out the significance of these various considerations for psycholinguistics, I have presented a fairly general conceptual analysis that is not (...) restricted to this case. The following papers consider in much more detail the particular features of the historical and current endeavors in developing psycholinguistics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Although the literature on multi-stakeholder initiatives for sustainability has grown in recent years, it is scattered across several academic fields, making it hard to ascertain how individual disciplines, such as business ethics, can further contribute to the debate. Based on an extensive review of the literature on certification and principle-based MSIs for sustainability, we show that the scholarly debate rests on three broad themes : theinputinto creating and governing MSIs; theinstitutionalizationof MSIs; and theimpactthat relevant initiatives create. While our discussion reveals (...) the theoretical underpinnings of the 3Is, it also shows that a number of research challenges related to business ethics remain unaddressed. We unpack these challenges and suggest how scholars can utilize theoretical insights in business ethics to push the boundaries of the field. Finally, we also discuss what business ethics research can gain from theory development in the MSI field. (shrink)

Levels of Analysis in Psychopathology draws research from psychiatry, philosophy, and psychology to explore the variety of explanatory approaches for understanding the nature of psychiatric disorders both in practice and research. The fields of psychiatry and clinical psychology incorporates many useful explanatory approaches and this book integrates this range of perspectives and makes suggestions about how to advance etiologic theories, classification, and treatment. The editors have brought together leading thinkers who have been widely published and are well-respected in their area (...) of expertise, including several developers of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and authors of the US National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria Project (RDoC). Each main chapter has a commentary provided by one of the other authors and an introduction written by one of the editors to create an accessible, interdisciplinary dialog. (shrink)

In setting a framework for the papers that follow, I have explored some of the major characteristics of disciplines and the factors that breed ethnocentrism among disciplines, considered what factors can lead researchers to cross disciplinary boundaries, and explored the kinds of conceptual as well as social and institutional products that result from cross-disciplinary work. While drawing out the significance of these various considerations for psycholinguistics, I have presented a fairly general conceptual analysis that is not (...) restricted to this case. The following papers consider in much more detail the particular features of the historical and current endeavors in developing psycholinguistics. (shrink)

Trust is a hot topic of academic research. Across disciplines – from philosophy to psychology to sociology – there is a growing body of scholarship on trust.1 This scholarship addresses, among othe...

This article extends Lemieux’s concern for the interdisciplinary tension between philosophy and sociology to the intradisciplinary tension within psychology between approaches to the study of children focusing on universal principles and approaches adopting a contextual lens. This tension arises both in how development is defined and in the methods chosen for its study. This tension is exemplified in terms of the recent American preoccupation with the Word Gap (WG), a supposed difference of 30 million words heard by socioeconomically diverse children (...) by the age of 4 that is blamed for educational disparities throughout the school years. The article discusses the political implications of WG discourse as it gives rise to the erasure of language practices of diverse Americans and obscures the role that the educational system plays in fostering a ‘one-size-fits-all’ instructional model. The article concludes with a discussion of attempts to combat the deficit model that the WG discourse reproduces. (shrink)

In 2012, choreographer and dancer Jill Sigman of jill sigman/thinkdance and visual artist Janine Antoni collaborated to produce Wedge, a live performance at the Albright-Knox Gallery. In this essay, I describe the collaboration and the resulting work and examine the benefits and challenges of the collaboration. The discussion touches on broader issues pertaining to collaboration, co-authorship, artists' intentions, and interpretation.

Journal of Human Values, Ahead of Print.

Co-authored by a Computer Scientist and a Digital Humanist, this article examines the challenges faced by cultural heritage institutions in the digital age, which have led to the closure of the vast majority of born-digital archival collections. It focuses particularly on cultural organizations such as libraries, museums and archives, used by historians, literary scholars and other Humanities scholars. Most born-digital records held by cultural organizations are inaccessible due to privacy, copyright, commercial and technical issues. Even when born-digital data are publicly (...) available, users often need to physically travel to repositories such as the British Library or the Bibliothèque Nationale de France to consult web pages. Provided with enough sample data from which to learn and train their models, AI, and more specifically machine learning algorithms, offer the opportunity to improve and ease the access to digital archives by learning to perform complex human tasks. These vary from providing intelligent support for searching the archives to automate tedious and time-consuming tasks. In this article, we focus on sensitivity review as a practical solution to unlock digital archives that would allow archival institutions to make non-sensitive information available. This promise to make archives more accessible does not come free of warnings for potential pitfalls and risks: inherent errors, "black box" approaches that make the algorithm inscrutable, and risks related to bias, fake, or partial information. Our central argument is that AI can deliver its promise to make digital archival collections more accessible, but it also creates new challenges - particularly in terms of ethics. In the conclusion, we insist on the importance of fairness, accountability and transparency in the process of making digital archives more accessible. (shrink)

Abstract This paper explores the role of symbolic languages within and between positivist disciplines. Symbolic languages, of which mathematics is the most important example, consist of tautologically true statements, such as 2 + 2 = 4. These must be operationalized before being useful for positivist research agendas (i.e. two apples and two oranges make four fruit). Disciplines may borrow either the symbolic languages of another discipline or the symbolic language and the accompanying operationalizations. The choice has important theoretical effects, and (...) affects the kind of interdisciplinary community created. The game theory community is an example of a community based on the interdisciplinary exchange of symbolic language only, while the ? political economy? community exchanges both symbolic languages and operationalizations. (shrink)

Increasingly, nurses conduct scientific inquiry into complex health‐care problems by collaborating on teams with researchers from other highly specialized fields. As cross‐disciplinary research proliferates and becomes institutionalized globally, researchers will increasingly encounter the need to integrate their particular research perspectives within inquiries without sacrificing the potential contributions of their discipline‐specific expertise. The work of the philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984) offers the necessary philosophical grounding. Here, I defend a role for philosophy in cross‐disciplinary research and present selected (...) ideas in Lonergan's work. These include: (1) a dynamic, normative pattern that each inquirer operates uniquely also forms the common core, or unity, in knowing; (2) the possibility of cross‐disciplinary knowledge development is dependent on each researcher's consciousness of her or his attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibleness; and (3) shifts in researchers' viewpoints, or horizons, facilitate their collaborative inquiry and their grasp of the unity in knowing. The desire to know, shared by team members, drives their inquiry. Lonergan's stance is consistent with nursing values because it respects, but does not unconditionally privilege, any researcher or discipline. Arguments support a claim that Lonergan's perspective is well suited to guide nurse researchers participating on cross‐disciplinary health research teams. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Discourse analysis has been widely applied to the study of environmental communication, highlighting how language is used to reflect and affect our attitudes towards the natural world. The potential of discourse analysis to ‘reveal’ the values that people attribute to nature has recently been recognized in the context of environmental debates. This paper takes a new cross-disciplinary approach to the analysis of evaluation, combining a discourse approach and insights from environmental philosophy and environmental policy to address the (...) following main questions: Which values of nature may be embedded in discourse about nature? To what extent are these values represented in people’s narratives about trees and woodland in the U.K.? What are the implications of the findings for the critical analysis of evaluative discourse? What are the implications of the findings for environmental organizations? The analysis is applied to a sample of 514 woodland narratives collected by the U.K. charitable environmental organization Woodland Trust in 2016. The study highlights new critical perspectives that may be gained from the analysis of evaluative discourse and the importance of considering and fostering people’s affective relationship with the natural world in building a strong basis for environmental action. (shrink)

Cross-disciplinary scientific collaboration is emerging as standard operating procedure for many scholarly research enterprises. And yet, the skill set needed for effective collaboration is neither taught nor mentored. The goal of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative is to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration. This book, inspired by this initiative, presents dialogue-based methods designed to increase mutual understanding among collaborators so as to enhance the quality and productivity of cross-disciplinary collaboration. It provides a theoretical context, principal activities, and (...) evidence for effectiveness that will assist readers in honing their collaborative skills. (shrink)

Forty years ago, Vaughn Ball demonstrated that the then received notion of conditional relevance served no useful purpose, as it would only come into effect if the probability of an element were 0.0. But, if the probability of an element were 0.0, a directed verdict would be in order and so once again conditional relevancy was doing no work. I extended that analysis to include the relationship between proffers of evidence and facts of consequence to demonstrate that the work that (...) conditional relevancy was supposedly doing was isomorphic to that done by relevancy in all significant ways, and yet the Federal Rules of Evidence provide different standards for the two situations to determine admissibility. I thus proposed an amendment to FRE 104(b) to provide for the same standard to be applied to ‘relevancy’ and ‘conditional relevancy’. In a recent article, Matthew Kotzen appears to subject this work to intense scrutiny and criticism, yet at the same time reaches, so far as I can tell, identical conclusions. This raises the question, which I examine, whether this is an example of cross-disciplinary difficulties in communication. (shrink)

The cross-disciplinary studies in this volume are of special interest because they link human purpose to the present debate between religion and the process of secularization. If that debate is to be a creative one, the notion of the 'human orderer' must be related significantly both to the sacred and secular realms. In fact, if man were not a purposive being, he would have neither religious nor secular problems. Questions about origins and destiny, divine purposiveness and the order (...) of human development, would not arise as topics of human concern. It would appear, then, that few would deny the fact of man's purposiveness in existence, that the pursuit of these purposes constitutes the dramas of history and culture. Yet the case is otherwise. For, concerning 'purposes' itself, widely divergent, even antithetical, views have been held. The common man has mistrusted its guidance for purpose, much too often, 'changes its mind'. Its fluctuations and whimsical nature are too much even for common sense. The sciences have identified purpose with the personal life and viewed it as a function of the subject self. Consequently they had no need for it in scientific method and objective knowledge. The religions of the world have used purpose in its holistic sense, for purposes of establishing grandious systems of religious totality and for stating the ultimate goals in man's destiny. (shrink)

I present the concept of cross-disciplinary legitimacy: the fieldwork which an anthropologist has done is considered legitimate fieldwork in another discipline as well. Also, I present a puzzle regarding how the anthropologist untrained in another discipline can do such fieldwork and a response.

Given the importance of cross-disciplinary research, facilitating CDR effectiveness is a priority for many institutions and funding agencies. There are a number of CDR types, however, and the effectiveness of facilitation efforts will require sensitivity to that diversity. This article presents a method characterizing a spectrum of CDR designed to inform facilitation efforts that relies on bibliometric techniques and citation data. We illustrate its use by the Toolbox Project, an ongoing effort to enhance cross-disciplinary communication in (...) CDR teams through structured, philosophical dialogue about research assumptions in a workshop setting. Toolbox Project workshops have been conducted with more than 85 research teams, but the project's extensibility to an objectively characterized range of CDR collaborations has not been examined. To guide wider application of the Toolbox Project, we have developed a method that uses multivariate statistical analyses of transformed citation proportions from published manuscripts to identify candidate areas of CDR, and then overlays information from previous Toolbox participant groups on these areas to determine candidate areas for future application. The approach supplies 3 results of general interest: A way to employ small data sets and familiar statistical techniques to characterize CDR spectra as a guide to scholarship on CDR patterns and trends. A model for using bibliometric techniques to guide broadly applicable interventions similar to the Toolbox. A method for identifying the location of collaborative CDR teams on a map of scientific activity, of use to research administrators, research teams, and other efforts to enhance CDR projects. (shrink)

Bringing together specialists in various fields, this volume shows that the transformation from the scholastic to more empirical approaches to psychology was a gradual process.