Metaphors as Transdisciplinary Vehicles of the Future

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Paper for the Conference on Science and Tradition: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on the way to the 21st Century (Paris, December 1991) organized with UNESCO by the Union des Ingenieurs et des Techniciens utilisant la Langue Francaise. Published in Congrès Science et Tradition: perspectives transdisciplinaires, ouvertures vers le XXIème siècle, 1991. Version française

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Metaphors as Transdisciplinary Vehicles of the Future
1. Constraints
2. Metaphor: an unexplored resource for transdisciplinarity
3. Images of disciplinary activity
4. Conceptual scaffolding
5. "Re-reading" patterns of concepts
6. Transdisciplinarity and its articulation
7. Transdisciplinarity: a sustainable ecology of developing conceptual frameworks
Conclusion
References

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0. Introduction

Despite the original promise of various initiatives, it is reasonable to assert that enthusiasm for "interdisciplinarity" has waned. There is continuing recognition that some degree of cross-disciplinary "fertilization" is fruitful, but the possibility of any interdisciplinary methodology is largely considered a contradiction in terms. Attention has instead focused on the manner in which some useful form of cross- fertilization can emerge in the application of different disciplinary methodologies in response to a single, concrete problem in practice. At its most cynical, this leads to programmes in which interdisciplinarity is only evident in the binding together of the individual disciplinary contributions in a single report of the initiative -- aptly described by the German term "Buchbindersynthese". Any integration is left to the reader. Relatively little progress has been made on the long-range reconceptualization of epistemology in the light of insights from any complementary set of disciplines.

Perhaps most disappointing, is the lack of investigation of interdisciplinarity in its own right -- other than in the above-mentioned juxtaposition of disciplines in response to a concrete problem. General systems has perhaps moved furthest towards this, but has failed to live up to its promise.

Despite this relatively negative picture, there is a desperate need for new ways of integrating insights from a wide range of disciplines which have little respect for one another (if they even recognize each others existence). How do the representatives of the different disciplines see their collective responsibility, if any, in facilitating the integration of insights which would make a success of such events as the purportedly crucial United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro, 1992) ?

This paper explores the use of metaphor, especially in the light of its cognitive function, in facilitating the formulation and communication of insights, whether between disciplines or beyond them, to those who depend upon them. It raises the question of the extent to which the necessary constraint of discipline should be complemented by a necessary freedom that is foreign to the nature of intra-disciplinary cognition. It is argued that it is in the understanding of this complementarity that the nature and potential of transdisciplinarity emerge.

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