Disciplinary Boundaries
- What Are They and How They Can Be Transgressed?
The astonishing fact is that no rigorous definition of disciplinary boundaries exists till now in literature. Based upon the transdisciplinary approach1, we are able to give such a rigorous definition.
We define disciplinary boundary as the totality of the results – past, present and future – obtained by the laws, norms, rules and practices of a given discipline. Of course, there is a direct relation between the extent to which a given discipline has been mathematically formulated and the extent to which this discipline has assumed a boundary. In other words, the more mathematically formalized a given discipline is, the more this respective discipline has a precise boundary.
Most of the disciplines are not mathematically formalized and therefore their boundaries are fluctuating in time. In spite of this fluctuation, there is a boundary defined as the limit of the totality of fluctuating boundaries of the respective discipline.
The unconscious barrier to a true understanding of what transdisciplinarity means by the words “beyond all discipline” comes from the inability of certain researchers to think the discontinuity. For them, the boundaries between disciplines are like boundaries between countries, continents and oceans on the surface of the Earth. These boundaries are fluctuating in time but a fact remains unchanged: the continuity between territories.
There is a real discontinuity between disciplinary boundaries: there is nothing, strictly nothing between two disciplinary boundaries, if we insist to explore this space between disciplines by old laws, norms, rules and practices. Radically new laws, norms, rules and practices are necessary.
Transdisciplinarity has no boundary. Therefore, transdisciplinarity can never lead to a super-discipline, super-science, super-religion or super-ideology.
This crucial fact is the result of the structural incompleteness of the key-concept of transdisciplinarity – levels of Reality.
In fact, it is precisely the incompleteness of levels of Reality which explains the existence of disciplinary boundaries. This might seem paradoxical but it is only a fake paradox. Disciplines are blind to incompleteness due to arbitrary elimination of the interaction between Subject and Object. Once this unjustified assumption is eliminated, disciplines are inevitably linked one to another. We explain how one understands this link between disciplines in the presence of incompleteness and discontinuity of levels of Reality?
A fusion of disciplinary boundaries is simply impossible in transdisciplinarity, because it would lead to a new boundary, whose even existence is incompatible with transdisciplinarity. Links and bridges between disciplines are still however possible: they are mediated by the interaction between Subject and Object, which cannot be captured by any discipline and by any boundary. The most obvious sign of the presence of these links and bridges is the modern and post-modern migration of concepts from one field of knowledge to another.
