Just out is the new edited volume on team science, Strategies for Success edited by Kara L. Hall, Amanda L. Vogel, and Robert T. Croyle. I have a co-authored chapter in the book: “Disciplinary Diversity in Teams: Integrative Approaches from Unidisciplinarity to Transdisciplinarity“.
The chapter is written with several other members of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (Michael O’Rourke, Stephen Crowley, Bethany Laursen, Brian Robinson, and Stephanie E. Vasko). We review many of the challenges facing inter- or transdisciplinary research and provide some remarks on how to overcome them.
This chapter is part of my larger research project in the philosophy of interdisciplinarity on metaphysics and social epistemology of integration. ‘Integration’ is something of a buzzword when talking about interdisciplinary. It’s generally agreed that it is important for teams composed of researchers from a diverse mix of disciplines. But often metaphors or magic are invoked when discussing it. The metaphors are loose and inconsistent. Some talk like integration almost magically happens for unexplainable reasons.
The thing is, however, I hate buzzwords, at least when the meaning is unclear. They just allow lazy thinking. In this chapter (and another forthcoming), part of my contribution was to elaborate a more concrete notion of integration and how to do it. In the chapter, we follow O’Rourke et al. (2016) in taking integration to be a process that takes inputs and produces a combined output(s). We can talk about social integration (creating a team from the input of team members) or epistemic integration (creating new, integrated knowledge from the input of the team member’s disciplinary knowledge).
The social epistemology of integration is, I think, one of the exciting and important areas of contemporary epistemology these days. It’s a place where philosophy has the opportunity to make an impact as well.
Anyway, the book and the chapter are now available. Check them out.