CommentaryFoundations of transdisciplinarity
Section snippets
Opening remarks
The structure of the great majority of Universities in terms of Faculties and departments, reinforce the uni-disciplinary formation, especially at the undergraduate levels. Therefore, a first step towards a necessary transformation should occur at the level of postgraduate programmes oriented, whenever possible, around thematic areas instead of specific disciplines. As an example, a postgraduate programme in “Water”, could call together engineers, lawyers, chemists, biologists, agronomists and
Clarification of concepts
To better understand what is being advanced here, we shall analyze the continuum that goes from discipline to transdiscipline.
Epistemology of transdisciplinarity
What has been presented so far, is based on a practical and simplified approach, addressed toward the applicability, for research purposes, of a method that tends to be transdisciplinary. I shall identify it, as will later be explained, as Weak Transdisciplinarity. Although, perhaps practical, it is insufficient. The transdisciplinarity to be discussed in the rest of this text will be identified as Strong Transdisciplinarity, meaning by it, that it goes much deeper into the realms of reality.
Beyond reason
In this sense it is interesting to note that Goethe, whose scientific contributions have been unjustly overshadowed because of his colossal achievements in literature and the arts, felt upset with what he believed to be the limitations of Newtonian physics. For Goethe, “science is as much an inner path of spiritual development as it is a discipline aimed at accumulating knowledge of the physical world. It involves not only a rigorous training of our faculties of observation and thinking, but
Levels of reality
For a pragmatic understanding of the different modes of thought, it is necessary to examine the first pillar of transdisciplinarity; that is, “Levels of Reality”.
Adopting the suggestion of Nicolescu, let us designate as reality “that which resists our experiences, representations, descriptions, images or mathematical formalizations. Quantum physics caused us to discover that abstraction is not simply an intermediary between us and Nature, a tool for describing reality, but rather, one of the
The logic of the included middle
Contraria sunt complementa was Niels Bohr's motto. That is to say “… day and night, particle and wave, sun and moon, male and female, reason and emotion, logic and intuition, matter and spirit, pragmatism and mysticism, discipline and transdiscipline not as dichotomies, but as complements that converge and merge without loosing their identities. The West defined its culture by wandering on just one side of the road: humans bewildered by the sun and the day, imposed reason and logic; organized
Complexity
Beyond the verification of the existence of different levels of reality, the last century has witnessed the appearance of complexity, of chaos, and of non-linear processes in many areas of science. Systemic visions have brought about the demise of the assumptions that Nature can be described, analyzed and controlled in simple terms that correlate with a traditional linear logic. All these new concepts have revolutionized many ambits of the basic sciences. However no significant break-through is
Summary and conclusion
Weak transdisciplinarity, as suggested in the first part of this paper, is a practical way of tackling problems in a more systemic way. It helps, but it is far from sufficient. Strong transdisciplinarity, on the other hand, is both a tool and a project. An unfinished project which demands many efforts of systematization still to be undertaken.
The disciplinary investigations concern only one level of reality. Transdiscipline, instead, extends its action through several levels of reality, in the
Coda
Said Lao Tsu, 2,500 years ago:
“Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub; It is the center hole that makes it useful. Shape clay into a vessel; It is the space within that makes it useful. Cut doors and windows for a room; It is the holes that make it useful. Therefore profit comes from what is there; Usefulness from what is not there.
From what Lao Tsu had to say, we may infer what I would like to call, even if only allegorically, the Third Law of Transdisciplinarity: “Only because of what is not there, it
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