Interdisciplinarity

Disciplines, Interdisciplines, and Interdisciplinarity

In the sense used here, “discipline” refers to a specific body of knowledge that is systematically organized, developed, and passed on. Interdisciplinarity then refers to crossing the boundaries between different disciplines in a specifically integrative way. This integration may involve a synthesis of information, methods, and ideas already existing in the different disciplines, or it may involve the generation of new concepts, models, and modes to combine them. While this definition appears simple, in fact, the issue is far more complex and contested. For example, is modern day “physics” a discipline or is it more like a federation of disciplines (nuclear physics, quantum physics, solid-state physics, and so on)? Are fields such as quantum chemistry and geopolitics disciplines, or are they examples of interdisciplinarity?

The term interdisciplines has been used to refer to fields where extended interaction has resulted in the development of a new discipline (e.g., biochemistry). However, this raises further questions, such as when does interdisciplinarity become disciplinarity? Is disciplinarity inevitable? What are the social factors involved in disciplinary development? All of these questions, and the definition of relevant terms, remain open to further research and debate as the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity continues to develop.

Drivers for Interdisciplinarity

There is a long history of both organizing knowledge into different subject areas (or disciplines) and of concern about the way this fragments our knowledge of the world. Interdisciplinarity might therefore be seen as part of an historical quest for unity in knowledge (a quest that both Plato and Aristotle assigned to philosophy as a universal field of inquiry). In its current form, this quest aims to add a process of synthesis to that of scientific analysis. In addition to this normative “unification of knowledge” driver, however, there is also an instrumental force motivating modern day interdisciplinarity. While industrialization and the “scientification” of knowledge in the 19th century increasingly restructured higher education toward greater specialization, modern societies now face a range of practical problems that are multifaceted and unable to be assigned to specialist disciplinary boxes. Solving complex, “real world” problems (such as unemployment or climate change), therefore, represents a current, instrumental, driver of interdisciplinarity.

Nanoscience as Interdisciplinarity

As a science defined by scale length, nanoscience is certainly not the sole domain of a single discipline, and it is certainly true that it is a multidisciplinary field. However, for nanoscience to be an interdisciplinary field, one needs to question the level of integration being achieved across the disciplines involved, both in research and in education. Recent bibliometric research suggests that nanoscience is not only multidisciplinary but also interdisciplinary. However, the level of interdisciplinarity appears comparable with other fields of research. While education programs in nanoscience generally offer material from a range of different disciplines, integration of the different perspectives is rarely prioritized. In nano-science education, the question of at what level interdisciplinarity becomes appropriate remains a topic for debate, with the traditional challenge of needing to balance breadth and depth of knowledge often being central.

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