Defining Interdisciplinarity

Austin, Timothy R.; Rauch, Alan; Blau, Herbert; Yúdice, George; Berg, Sara van den; Robinson, Lillian S.; Henkel, Jacqueline M.; Murray, Timothy; Schoenfield, Mark; Traub, Valerie; Torgovnick, Marianna

doi:10.2307/463106

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…In several areas, interdisciplinarity became an aspiration goal for the academy as it suggested the creation of links between different fields of knowledge, the emergence of new ideas, enrichment from other perspectives, and the promotion of greater collegiality, flexibility, and academic collaboration. (Aram, 2016;Austin et al, 1996). Very early on, Apostel noted the importance of teaching the various disciplines within their dynamic relationships with other areas, and of fostering interdisciplinary research in universities (Apostel, Berger, Briggs, & Michaud, 1972).…”

Section: The Challenge Of Interdisciplinaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Intellectual Virtues for Interdisciplinary Research: A Consensual Qualitative Analysis

Vanney,

Mesurado,

Sáenz

et al. 2023

Cognitive Science

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Through a qualitative approach, this study identified a specific subgroup of intellectual virtues necessary for developing interdisciplinary research. Cognitive science was initially conceived as a new discipline emerging from various fields, including philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and anthropology. Thus, a frequent debate among cognitive scientists is whether the initial multidisciplinary program successfully developed into a mature interdisciplinary field or evolved into a set of independent sciences of cognition. For several years, interdisciplinarity has been an aspiration for the academy, although the difficulties limiting the success of interdisciplinary collaborations have begun to erode that initial optimism. Our analysis suggests that the problems hindering the success of interdisciplinarity can be overcome by fostering certain intellectual character strengths in scholars. The Consensual Qualitative Research method was used to analyze nine semi‐structured interviews involving researchers with a long personal trajectory of interdisciplinary research between the sciences and the humanities. Three virtue domains emerged from the interviews’ analysis: (i) intellectual virtues, (ii) social virtues, and (iii) interpersonal intellectual virtues. The virtues of the third domain intersect with intellectual and social ones. They are intellectual because they pursue epistemic goods. But, unlike other intellectual virtues, they only develop in interpersonal settings, so they can also be considered to have a social component. Interpersonal intellectual virtues can be thus defined as intellectual character traits that facilitate the acquisition of knowledge (intellectual motivation) with and through other people in a reciprocal way (social environment). These virtues are essential for developing any successful collective epistemic enterprise, interdisciplinary research being a privileged context where these qualities manifest themselves in a relevant way.

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Section: The Challenge Of Interdisciplinaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Intellectual Virtues for Interdisciplinary Research: A Consensual Qualitative Analysis

Vanney,

Mesurado,

Sáenz

et al. 2023

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The notions of multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, which are now common in academic fields and apply to both teaching and research, have developed as a result of this effort (Apostel et al 1972; National Academy of Science 2005; Thompson Klein 2017). 3 Although there is no single definition of these notions (Austin et al 1996, Alvargonzález 2011, multidisciplinary work is characterized by the incorporation of contributions from various disciplines. During the development of a multidisciplinary research, researchers use the method of their own discipline to investigate an object in an autonomous way.…”

Section: What Is Interdisciplinary Research?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Second-person Perspective in Interdisciplinary Research: A Cognitive Approach for Understanding and Improving the Dynamics of Collaborative Research Teams

Vanney

Sáenz

2021

SetF

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In this paper, we argue that to reverse the excess of specialization and to create room for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, it seems necessary to move the existing epistemic plurality towards a collaborative process of social cognition. In order to achieve this, we propose to extend the psychological notion of joint attention towards what we call joint intellectual attention. This special kind of joint attention involves a shared awareness of sharing the cognitive process of knowledge. We claim that if an interdisciplinary research team aspires to work collaboratively, it is essential for the researchers to jointly focus their attention towards a common object and establish a second-person relatedness among them. We consider some of the intellectual dispositions or virtues fostered by joint intellectual attention that facilitate interdisciplinary exchange, and explore some of the practical consequences of this cognitive approach to interdisciplinarity for education and research.

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“…They construct a qualitative framework to classify types of interdisciplinarity, and for example distinguish empirical, theoretical and methodological interdisciplinarities. The multidimensionnal aspect of interdisciplinarity is confirmed even within a specific field such as literature (Austin et al, 1996). A first way to quantify interdisciplinarity of a set of publications is to look at the proportion of disciplines outside a main discipline in which they are published, as Rinia et al (2002) do for the evaluation of projects in physics, complementary with judgement of experts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploration of an interdisciplinary scientific landscape

Raimbault

2019

Scientometrics

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Patterns of interdisciplinarity in science can be quantified through diverse complementary dimensions. This paper studies as a case study the scientific environment of a generalist journal in Geography, Cybergeo, in order to introduce a novel methodology combining citation network analysis and semantic analysis. We collect a large corpus of around 200,000 articles with their abstracts and the corresponding citation network that provides a first citation classification. Relevant keywords are extracted for each article through text-mining, allowing us to construct a semantic classification. We study the qualitative patterns of relations between endogenous disciplines within each classification, and finally show the complementarity of classifications and of their associated interdisciplinarity measures. The tools we develop accordingly are open and reusable for similar large scale studies of scientific environments.

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Defining Interdisciplinarity

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Intellectual Virtues for Interdisciplinary Research: A Consensual Qualitative Analysis

Intellectual Virtues for Interdisciplinary Research: A Consensual Qualitative Analysis

Second-person Perspective in Interdisciplinary Research: A Cognitive Approach for Understanding and Improving the Dynamics of Collaborative Research Teams

Exploration of an interdisciplinary scientific landscape

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