HR: 16:00h
AN: H14A-01 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: Interdisciplinary Knowledge Integration: Genuine Scientific Inquiry or 'Full-Bodied' Red Wine?
AU: * Christakos, G
EM: george\_christakos@unc.edu
AF: University of North Carolina, 111 Rosenau Hall CB#7431, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7431
AB: If the development of conceptual models is going to produce rigorous rules for the integration of knowledge from different disciplines and levels of organization, it should rely on an adequate understanding of scientific interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, however, is not always a clearly understood and widely accepted concept: (i) Interdisciplinarity has been viewed by certain groups in the same context as the unification of science, which refers to the pyramidal hierarchy that reduces one domain of science to another, seeking the unity of science and searching for the ultimate scientific truth. (ii) A distinction is made between interdisciplinarity producing a new discipline and interdisciplinarity involving the continuing interaction of a variety of disciplines without leading to a separate discipline. (iii) Another distinction is made between interdisciplinarity viewed as a merely practical activity happening on an everyday basis (e.g., studying the components of structured whole in isolation and applying ad hoc combinations to yield the final result) and interdisciplinarity considered for scientific research purposes (in which case issues of disciplinary incompleteness and non-reductive autonomy to be blended with another one may arise). In view of the above, genuinely interdisciplinary and innovative knowledge integration should not be confused with cosmetic inderdisciplinarity, the latter having a superficial and ad hoc interdisciplinary character allowing disciplinary business to go on as usual at the cheap price of some interdisciplinary rhetoric. In the cosmetic case 'interdisciplinarity' is used to describe -and praise- research projects as routinely as 'full-bodied' is used to describe red wines.
DE: 9810 New fields (not classifiable under other headings)
DE: 9820 Techniques applicable in three or more fields
DE: 1899 General or miscellaneous
DE: 1829 Groundwater hydrology
DE: 1869 Stochastic processes
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting