Where is disciplinarity going? Meeting on the borderland

Abstract

This article analyzes the cognitive structures and dynamics of a form of scientific discipline that differs importantly both from the disciplinary format of the 19th-century university system, and from the profile proposed by much postmodern interdisciplinary (anti-disciplinary) discussion. This recent form of discipline, here termed the 'new disciplinarity', is a product of the increasing complexity of scientific knowledge and activity. The approach privileges cognition. It emphasizes the concepts of disciplinary referent, robust boundaries, 'borderland', combinatorials and projects. It suggests that the new disciplinarity is highly elastic and that it is a spawning-ground for new disciplines. RésuméCet article analyse la structure cognitive et la dynamique des disciplines scientifiques et s'attache à montrer qu'elles diffèrent fortement du modèle des universités du 19ème siècle. Cette forme récente de discipline scientifique est désignée par le terme 'nouvelle disciplinarité'. Elle est un produit de la complexité croissante des connaissances et de l'activité scientifiques. L'approche adoptée ici privilégie les contenus cognitifs et constitue une réfutation de la perspective post-moderne sur la science et l'interdisciplinarité. Elle met l'accent sur les concepts de référent disciplinaire, de robustesse des frontières, de ' zone franche', de combinatoire et de projets. Elle suggère que la

Interdisciplinary Mathematics Education: A State of the Art

“…Although there is an ongoing debate that holds classical disciplinarity to be extinct, the fact of continuing discussion of interdisciplinarity as a topic marks the problem as one that continues to be alive (Marcovich and Shinn 2011). In fact, disciplinarity may be understood as a multifaceted and nested system, where different forms of inquiry are situated at one or another level of complexity of the inquiry process: mono !…”

Relocating the History of Science

“…Here, I want just to point out how the "in-between" character of quantum chemistry favored its action as a donor subdiscipline, promoting the appearance of other subdisciplines such as quantum biochemistry, quantum biology (and to a lesser extent quantum pharmacology), as well as molecular engineering, materials science, and engineering, and last but not the least, computational chemistry and computer sciences. In some instances, it opened the way to a new scenario that centered on the amalgamation of former disciplines, convening experts from different areas in looking at the same problems and bringing in their respective points of view and expert opinions, in what has been called the "new disciplinarity" (Marcovich and Shinn 2011). Finally, it also provided the historical materials and reflections for many incursions into the emerging new area of philosophy of chemistry.…”

The many dimensions of laboratories’ interdisciplinarity

“…Interdisciplinarity means, at the most generic level, some degree of integration of different disciplines (Weingart and Stehr 2000;Porter and Rafols 2009;Marcovich and Shinn 2011;Wagner et al 2011;Rafols et al 2012). To transform this idea into quantitative indicators, we need to answer three questions:…”

“…How to distinguish research that simply juxtaposes different disciplines, as an encyclopedia that gathers entries from different fields, from real interdisciplinary work that achieves full integration of different fields to create a new discipline? This is a key issue for understanding the cognitive aspects of interdisciplinarity (Marcovich and Shinn 2011). Unfortunately, it is very difficult to distinguish between these different possibilities using scientometrics' indicators.…”