This is a rhetorical question; the answer is, of course, “yes” because there are researchers who stray out of the confines of their specific scientific domain and wander out toward another scientific domain, ending in that no man’s land so dear to Michel Foucault.
The In Silico World consortium has recently released in open access a report entitled “Regulatory barriers to the adoption of in silico trials”, which summarises years of work on this specific topic. In chapter 4 of this report, entitled “A reflection on interdisciplinary decision-making”, we debate with a very narrow focus the complex issue of recognising justified true belief in an interdisciplinary domain”. But from it, we drew a more general reflection that we propose here.
Suppose we accept Thomas Kuhn's idea that in each scientific domain, periods of cumulative progress are periodically interrupted by periods of revolutionary science when the whole domain jumps from one paradigm to another. In that case, we see how interdisciplinary scientists are heralds of a particular class of paradigm change, modifying the confines of that scientific domain (or creating a new one).
But these researchers travel in dangerous, unexplored lands. The biggest risk is the lack of well-tested pragmatic epistemology. There are many reasons why science fractions knowledge space into scientific domains. A particularly important one is the need for a pragmatic, operational interpretation of the process through which a group of peers agree on a particular belief. The best way to collectively decide when a belief is a Justified True Belief varies considerably over the knowledge space. The ways physical and social sciences decide what a Justified True Belief is are very different and form what we call the pragmatic epistemology of each subdomain of science.
The scientific method is unforgiving; in particular, if the peers of a scientific domain choose an ineffective pragmatic epistemology, the result will be that they will tend to assume as true (and build upon it) tentative knowledge that is then falsified at a later stage. Everything produced using that tentative knowledge must be trashed when this happens, and the overall cost can be very high. So eventually, the peers of each scientific domain develop a set of operational rules tempered at the fire of experience to decide how, in that specific knowledge territory, a Justified True Belief is considered as such.
If you are conducting interdisciplinary research, you are wandering out of the comfort zone of your domain of origin. For example, say you are a physicist who has started exploring particular aspects of living organisms, a topic traditionally within the remit of biology. The pragmatic epistemologies of biology and physics are profoundly different, and rightfully so. Our physicist is faced with two choices: either continue to be coherent with his/her domain of origin and use the pragmatic epistemology of physics or adopt that of the host domain, biology. The first option is usually healthier: not having been trained as a biologist, the choice to adopt the pragmatic epistemology of biology can be challenging for a physicist (and vice versa, of course). But in both cases, the choice is always poor. That is because that researcher is not investigating physics or biology but a new knowledge domain (let us call it biophysics) for which a well-tested pragmatic epistemology is not yet available.
Interdisciplinary research is precious because it expands the scientific enquiry to previously untouched portions of the knowledge space. However, we must accept that it operates in difficult conditions from an epistemological point of view, and the quality of the knowledge produced might not be as high as that provided by other, more established domains. It also requires a very special mindset, which is less rigid and more accepting. However, the biggest challenge is the need for epistemological attention. Most scientists are uninterested in how knowledge is produced from a philosophical point of view; like cops, they apply the existing laws with little interest in how the legislative process works. Interdisciplinary scientists do not have this luxury; they need to understand the philosophical basis of their work and spend time debating how to decide what is true.
“Does interdisciplinary science truly exist?” ©2024 by Marco Viceconti is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0).
This opinion piece was published in my personal blog, and as an Open Access document on Zenodo.
