This article situates current debates about transdisciplinarity within the deeper history of academic disciplinarity, in its difference from the notions of inter- and multi-disciplinarity. It offers a brief typology and history of established conceptions of transdisciplinarity within science and technology studies. It then goes on to raise the question of the conceptual structure of transdisciplinary generality in the humanities, with respect to the incorporation of the 19th- and 20th-century German and French philosophical traditions into the anglophone humanities, under the name (...) of ‘theory’. It identifies two distinct – dialectical and anti-dialectical, or dialectical and transversal – transdisciplinary trajectories. It locates the various contributions to the special issue of which it is the introduction within this conceptual field, drawing attention to the distinct contribution of the French debates about structuralism and its aftermath – those by Serres, Foucault, Derrida, Guattari and Latour, in particular. It concludes with an appendix on Foucault’s place within current debates about disciplinarity and academic disciplines. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis essay attempts to show the decisive importance of the “scientific discipline” for any historical or sociological analysis of modern science. There are two reasons for this:1. A discontinuity can be observed at the beginning of modern science: the “discipline,” which up until that time had been a classificatorily generated unit of the ordering of knowledge for purposes of instruction in schools and universities, develops into a genuine and concrete social system of scientific communication. Scientific disciplines as concrete systems (...) (Realsysteme) arise as a result of (a) the communicative stabilization of “scientific communities” at the end of the eighteenth century and the formation of “appropriate” roles and organizational structures (in universities); (b) the structural differentiation of the new scientific disciplines from the established professions (law, theology, medicine) in Europe; (c) the formation of scientific communication in the standardized form of scientific publication; the distinction of the separate action-type “scientific research” and the differentiation of these two elementary acts of all future scientific endeavor in relation to each other.2. The scientific discipline as primary unit of the internal differentiation of science has, since its genesis, been stabilized by two conditions: (a) The fact of a science differentiated into a plurality of (competing, mutually stimulating) disciplinary perspectives becomes the chief causal factor underlying the developmental dynamism of modern science; (b) Similar to the way in which the discipline functions as a cognitive address within the system of science, science also links the discipline up as a structural unit (utilized in both systems) with curricular structures in the system of education — i.e., it is stabilized by the central system/environment relation of science. (shrink)

Serological data have been used to address anthropological problems since the turn of the century. These were predominantly problems of two kinds in anthropological systematics: the relations of human populations to one another (racial serology), and the relations of primate species to one another (systematic serology). Though they were the locus of considerable debate about the relative merits of 'genetic' versus 'traditional' data, the serological work had little lasting impact in the field. I attribute this to the fact that the (...) research was carried out largely externally to anthropology, and often interpreted in facile manners. To a large extent the history of this research has been ignored or rewritten following the development of 'molecular anthropology' in the 1960s. To some extent, however, contemporary genetic research in anthropology replays aspects of the serological era. (shrink)

During the 1920s and 1930s the testing of blood groups for large numbers of people became a very common practice. Although much of this was to ensure compatibility for blood transfusion, over 1,000 articles were published with results of tests on over 1.3 million people to answer more theoretical, scientific questions. The motivation for much of this research was the possible link between the well established hereditary blood types and other possible inherited traits. Because the existence of the blood groups (...) was a rather sudden discovery, the record of this publication offers an excellent case study of the diffusion of new scientific knowledge. Differences in the beginning of blood group research from country to country reveal some important influences of social setting on the spread and application of the new discoveries. (shrink)

The ideas of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity have been widely applied to the relationship between sciences. This article is an attempt to discuss the reasons why scientific interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity pose specific problems. First of all, certain questions about terminology are taken into account in order to clarify the meaning of the word ?discipline? and its cognates. Secondly, we argue that the specificity of sciences does not lie in becoming disciplines. Then, we focus on the relationship between sciences, and between sciences (...) and technologies: we argue that multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are a common practice among strict sciences and technologies. Finally, we discuss the different meanings of transdisciplinarity when it is applied to sciences. (shrink)

This paper explores how three central figures in the field of British prehistory – Sir Arthur Keith, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith and Louis Leakey – deployed different disciplinary practices and narrative devices in the popular accounts of human bio-cultural evolution that they produced during the early decades of the twentieth century. It shows how they used a variety of strategies, ranging from virtual witness through personal testimony to tactile demonstration, to ground their authority to interpret the increasingly wide range of (...) fossil material available and to answer the bewildering variety of questions that could be asked about them. It investigates the way in which they positioned their own professional expertise in relation to fossil interpretation, particularly with regard to the – sometimes controversial – use they made of concepts, evidence and practices drawn from other disciplines. In doing so, they made claims that went beyond their original disciplinary boundaries. The paper argues that while none of these writers were able, ultimately, to support the wider claims they made regarding human prehistory, the nature of these claims deserves much closer attention, particularly with respect to the public role that historians of science can and should play in relation to present-day calls for greater interdisciplinarity. (shrink)