From Interdisciplinarity to Transdisciplinarity

An Epistemological Perspective

Abstract

For the last decades, a new field of scholarly research has emerged and become important in the natural sciences, namely, complexity. Within the contemporary tendency to seek an integrated knowledge, the implications of this notion have stimulated epistemological reflection, leading to two distinct perspectives: the re-evaluation of interdisciplinarity and the beginning of transdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity allows for a better comprehension of a given object which, due to its complexity, would be difficult to grasp using only the methodology of a single discipline. Yet some researchers consider the interdisciplinary method to be insufficient to the point of focusing their attention upon the transdisciplinary method, which they see as capable of sustaining and integrating the various ways in which reality is examined. Transdisciplinarity is thought to be the most developed phase of integration between the disciplines, allowing for their relations to occur within a system without fixed boundaries between them. The implications of such an approach are examined in this article.