Abstract
What does it take to perform collaborative interdisciplinarity with good epistemic and academic results? This pragmatical question, slightly rephrased, has been one of the few key issues of the philosophical studies on interdisciplinarity since the Seventies. In this paper I aim at addressing that question adopting a conceptual framework weirdly not yet used for this purpose: distributed cognition theories. In particular I will focus on the embodied, emerging, and extended nature of cognitive activities at the core of successful examples of collaborative interdisciplinarity. In the first section of this paper I will briefly review the literature on interdisciplinary collaborations. In the second section I will present the perspective from which I aim at addressing their recurrent problems: a broadly conceived distributed cognition theory, which incorporates insights from the extended mind approach, and from the theories on emerging and embodied cognition. In the third section of the paper I will analyze some of the usual emerging problems of collaborative interdisciplinarity by referring to some well-documented case studies. Then, I will propose some ways to face those problems in the organization and development of a collaborative interdisciplinary project, referring to it as a complex system of distributed cognitive activities.
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Notes
- 1.
Here I need to add a necessary terminological note. In this paper I will use “interdisciplinarity” without specifying the difference between it and similar terms—such as transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and others—that have been painstakingly described and differentiated by a part of the philosophical literature in the last forty years or so—cf. Jantsch (1970), Klein (1990), Thorén and Persson (2013). I will not adopt a high differentiated distinction between inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinarity for two reasons: (1) the main difference between interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity revolves on the connections between different fields rather than between people. Since I’m more interested in the forms of collaboration that are established between researchers with different background knowledge, I believe that specifying the inter-, multi-, trans-disciplinary relations between fields would be quite gratuitous in this research. (2) I will not adopt interdisciplinarity as a precise term to define “coordination by high-level concepts” as described by Jantsch (1970), nor I will adopt a more specific philosophical description for it (as the one provided by Apostel et al. (1972) as activities involving the integration of concepts, procedures, epistemology, terminology, and data). Indeed, I will use interdisciplinarity in the same way that the non-philosophical literature uses it, as the umbrella term that covers every kind of interaction between researchers with different disciplinary expertise. Anyhow, I am aware that the interaction between these people can take many forms, so I will specify in every occasion, that I will discuss “collaborative” interdisciplinarity, as the interaction among people from different fields who aim at collaborate to reach a common goal. In this sense, my use of the word is closer to the definition provided by Boden (1997, p. 18) of co-operative interdisciplinarity, as “an enterprise in which several groups with complimentary skills work towards a common goal, actively co-operating on the way.”
- 2.
For a more specific view on the philosophical aspects of philosophy of interdisciplinary science see Maki (2016).
- 3.
- 4.
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Arfini, S. (2020). Distributed Cognition in Aid of Interdisciplinary Collaborations. In: Bertolotti, T. (eds) Cognition in 3E: Emergent, Embodied, Extended. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 56. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46339-7_1
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