Abstract
Questions about what experts need to know to facilitate their collaboration in interdisciplinary situations are usually answered with proposals concerning the technical methods, epistemic ground rules, and explanatory theories that one applies “across” disciplines, just as such methods, rules, and theories are applied “within” a discipline. However, (post-Husserlian) phenomenology offers something better. Instead of following the traditional route of looking for general conditions that apply to collaborative practice, phenomenology turns to what actually happens in collaborative experience and shows that success is not just a function of applied procedures, even when they are in play. Instead, individual experts seem to rediscover their ability to keep their thoughts and concepts looser, more informal, and open-endedly responsive to the situation—just as they did when they first began to shape unfamiliar circumstances into a regionally shared practice—only now with potentially interdisciplinary circumstances as their experienced phenomenon. By cultivating an awareness of how it is with life prior to its being variously studied, exploited, or harnessed to explanatory theories and essentialist ideas, they remain open to becoming expert collaborators, just as they are already regional experts. An example of this process is given from the authors’ recent field research.
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19 March 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-022-09624-8
Notes
The phrase is still widely used, but one should be aware that the ecology of Big Science has changed over the last two or three decades. Unlike the typically massive single-project laboratories of the post-Cold War era, one is now much more likely to find Big Science locations that allow “diverse, interdisciplinary teams of researchers to work on projects involving multiple instruments at a single facility and to connect with users at other facilities” (Crease & Westfall, 2016: 30).
In this vein, some theorists then emphasize that collaboration often needs to include reference to stakeholders that are not professionals or scientific researchers (National Research Council, 2014); some emphasize the importance of the transfer and integration of knowledge from various fields (Westberg & Polk, 2016; also Wright Morton et al., 2015; and); and some (especially in medicine, the physical and biological sciences, and policy planning) have stressed the importance of highlighting the differences between “multi-,” “inter-,” and “”transdisciplinary” interpretations of the increasing degree of collaborative involvement as being, respectively, additive, interactive, and holistic (Choi & Pak, 2006). A few have also focused on the implications of greater reach and collaborative intimacy associated with seeing things in a “transdisciplinary” way to include the need to become informed by and to actually employ knowledge acquired from many sources in practice (Rigolot, 2020). As we will explain below, however, while we share the sentiments expressed in these usages, our orientation is quite different from them.
Our use of this term therefore lies at a kind of extreme opposite end of the spectrum that runs from systems-theoretical accounts of how disciplines are organized and for what purposes to phenomenological accounts of the actual disclosure in experience of the activity of engaging in practices that are now strongly disclosed to us as requiring collaboration rather than silo- or even private individual-treatment. What we mean, e.g., bears no relation to the term as coined by Jean Piaget (1972) or Ernst Jantsch (1972). Both of them conceived of transdisciplinarity (one might say at least quasi-metaphysically) as a kind of final, developmental stage in the process of systematizing of knowledge production in which all that was available within and between disciplines is organized and mobilized. Jantsch’s model is more explicitly intended for socio-political purposes, whereas Piaget’s conception of a “general” (i.e., fully organized and integrated search for knowledge) science is more epistemological, but neither is concerned with what it is (or would be?) like to live through the search for and application of knowledge “using” their models.
At this point in the paper, we could have chosen a cross disciplinary research project, a multidisciplinary engineering and development effort, or another form of medical collaboration addressing a wicked problem. For simplicity of exposition, however, we have chosen a less elaborate situation that is just complex enough to show how experts from a range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds acquire a sufficient level of shared understanding to carry out a joint action. We consider it a strength of our model that its simplicity is likely to facilitate the identification of important variables—but in a way that nevertheless sustains the phenomenological perspective take here. See also, note 8.
One of the authors recently overheard a group discussion involving a multidisciplinary project on clean water that had to grapple with 15 different definitions of the word “filter”.
Leibniz’ mathematically inspired sentiments still animate today’s AI utopians: “What must be achieved is in fact this: That every paralogism be recognized as an error of calculation, and that every Sophism when expressed in this new kind of notation…be corrected easily by the laws of this philosophic grammar…Once this is done, then when a controversy arises, disputation will no more be needed between two philosophers than between two computers. It will suffice that, pen in hand, they sit down…and say to each other: ‘Let us calculate’” (Leibniz 1965: 14).
In what follows, we will help ourselves to the benefits of focusing on collaboration among “experts” who are already motivated by their assignment to address a task that all recognize cannot be tackled by just one or two forms of expertise alone. In our work, it has been important to make these limitations explicit, not in order to be modest but in order to mark out the field in which further research is called for. Other variables we ignore here clearly abound in collaborative practices. How much does it matter, e.g., whether experts recognize the other collaborators as also being experts? Nurses and social workers tell many tales about the attitude of surgeons toward those who give palliative care. What difference(s) does it make if the collaborators are all men? All women? A mixture? Of markedly different ages and/or ethnic backgrounds? How and in what ways does “motivation” figure in collaborative projects, especially when not all team members are “equally” motivated? Is “expertise” always the product of special training? How do matters change when a team must include non-experts? And so on…
This problem deepens when a term, idea, or practice arises entirely or most frequently within one expert’s domain and so may not be familiar at all to their collaborators.
Of course, there is a spectrum of possible abstracting here. To put it quickly, in the accountant’s ledger, a patient’s pain “appears” less directly than it does to a surgeon, and still less directly than it does to a palliative care nurse. At the extreme end, for scientific purposes, the abstracting process goes much further and becomes much more rigorous. So, e.g., in a laboratory, a patient’s “pain” reports continue to belong only to “an” individual whose identity is irrelevant to the process of testing, measuring, and modeling to which it is submitted. In short, it is made as fully “objective” as rationalized procedures allow. (In a hospital known to one of the authors, the laboratory staff was happy to discover that expansion plans included a new wing that would contain only laboratories.).
Gordon (2006) notes that there is a tendency in modern disciplines towards what he calls “decadence,” a stage of decay where disciplines get conceived entirely through their methods. When this happens, scholars tend to “ontologize” their disciplines, and come to believe that it is only through their approach that reality can properly be viewed and understood by anyone, not just researchers in their particular discipline. For decadent disciplines, all other disciplines are, therefore, methodologically deficient (33–35). It especially important to understand this when one studies the historicity of disciplines; and it is crucial for phenomenologically understanding in a precise way just how the procedural-cum-ontological model of some given discipline comes to be elevated to a general and unjustifiably hegemonic philosophical position. However, Gordon concludes his analysis just at the point where we want to begin. For us, his conception of “decadence” still represents “something that happens” in the development of disciplines, which means that as phenomenologically illuminating as it may be, it is still an account of what goes on in disciplines, not for its practitioners. Moreover, and perhaps because of this focus, Gordon’s suggested solution appears to involve the suggestion that one try, so to speak, to leave their discipline’s decadent past behind in a move he calls “a teleological suspension of disciplinarity”. For post-Husserlians like us, however, the issue is not conceiving of a post-decadent discipline but transforming one’s own “having already been” an inheritor of this discipline. Leaving one’s past behind is precisely what “being historical” makes impossible. In the end, then, it is not surprising that Gordon only tells us what he thinks would give us a fresh start, with no analysis of the lived historical-temporal process of “suspending” that one would actually have to live through to accomplish this. Eventually, it does indeed seem to be possible for one to move beyond the silo-like boundaries of one’s own discipline—and for philosophers, maybe even beyond the collaboratively disciplinary pursuit of “knowledge” itself in a way that opens us up to thinking “beyond philosophy [as possessing a defined outlook] to greater commitments” and thus “breathe life into [today’s technical method-obsessed] philosophy's gasping lungs (Gordon 2006: 34; and Gordon 2011: 99). Yet our goal is to consider how one might do this, and we start with this question rather than with the fact that it seems to have happened in some good cases but often not.
Although we think our description of the experiential process of becoming interdisciplinary constitutes a phenomenologically necessary shift away from the usual focus on disciplines themselves and the problems of organizing them and managing their relations, we certainly do not believe the need for this shift itself had to await our discovery. In additions to the ones we cite, numerous figures have written about collaborative research out of their own experience—e.g., Gaston Bachelard (2002) and Ludwik Fleck (1979), both of whom express frustration with institutional-level, method-centered outlook of the traditional philosophy of science and speak about this out of existential concern, not intellectual commitment. Moreover, it is as scientists themselves that they see the need to move in an interdisciplinary direction. Hence, although discussions of Bachelard’s anti-Cartesian account of “epistemological rupture” and Fleck’s nuanced descriptions of the shared “moods” and “styles” of “thought collectives” have usually been associated with historical and social-psychological accounts of disciplinary evolution, they do indeed appear to have a “phenomenological” feel for collaboration in the sense we argue for here. It would, of course, take considerable effort to bring them into an interdisciplinary conversation they did not live to see and could not have considered in its own right. Yet both of them did seem to understand that when the old idea that what is essential to science is its epistemic rules began to fail, we must turn to each other and to our experience of the ways in which new findings disrupt any process defined by such rules.
And we privilege the manipulation generic universals by calling it “intelligence” and sending those who have lots of it to the “best” schools.
It is “how” we are always already global understanders of everything—even if that understanding can do no better than recognize something unclear, puzzling, or mysterious. Eugene Gendlin, who also comes to this feature of existence by way of Dilthey, has written some of the clearest and most detailed accounts of it; he calls this general, always given, situated, and at-best-only-partially-accessible-sense-of-everything-making-sense-even-before-it-is-conceptualized/theorized “experiencing” (in Dilthey’s sense of erleben or living-through), or “felt sense,” or the “greater intricacy” that we try to articulate in various ways in light of various life-concerns. See Gendlin (2018, esp. Chs. 2, 5, 14, and 15) and Gendlin (1997: 63–137).
We conclude, however, with this cautionary note. “Taking reflective notice” of the possibility of transdisciplinarity is more like what Dilthey and the young Heidegger call heightened self-awareness (Besinnung) than traditional reflection (Reflexion). The master models for the latter are Cartesian meditation or Kantian transcendental reflection. In either case, it is understood as kind of third-person standpoint that takes the measure of one’s thoughts and makes cognitive judgments “about” one’s Level 1 experience that come “after” it, clean it up, and thus turn subjective confusions and sloppiness into cognitions that are philosophically respectable. Even those like Polanyi who resist this way of interpreting pre-theoretical life and defend its role in acquiring knowledge still tend follow this “reflective” depiction of it by calling “tacit,” that is, as without the disciplined and organized character of cognition. In Natorp’s famous Kantian-inspired imagery, one cannot reflectively “still the stream” of experience in hopes of directly describing its operation. One must “kill subjectivity in order to dissect it (cited in Scharff 2019: 122–126).
Phenomenologically considered, however, this traditional sort of reflection characteristically fails to acknowledge its own origin. It derives, not from Level 1 experience but from the Level 3, science-minded epistemology of subjects confronting objects—with no acknowledgement regarding the way it accepts a pared down version of “thinking about everything in my world” such that only subjects confronting objects are left. Of course when “subjects” reflect, they find only what remains after “experience” has been turned into an “experimental encounter”. Our research, however, confirms that to understand human things rather than explain them objectively, we must take our humanity—not just our well-trained “minds”—with us. “Who” we are goes hand in hand with “what” can be disclosed to us.
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Scharff, R.C., Stone, D.A. Transdisciplinarity Without Method: On Being Interdisciplinary in a Technoscientific World. Hum Stud 45, 1–25 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09616-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09616-0