Talking Points about

TRANS-DISCIPLINARY INDUCTION (TDI) or

SEVEN STEPS IN THE LIFE OF AN ACADEMIC OUTLAW

1. Problem: the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge-based economy

2. Meta-Methodological Dilemma: other than knowledge there is a range of such questions like the meaning of life, freedom, poverty, culture, human development, truth, justice – once the domain of ‘philosophy’ now of proliferating sub-disciplines and specialties in the humanities & social sciences including law as well as the Arts

3. Methodology: contrast trans- with inter-disciplinary research (inter- as borrowing but maintaining barriers and paradigmatic incommensurability; trans- as transcending barriers uncovering commonalities, isomorphisms and perhaps 'essence' thru induction of many observations – 17 + Exhibit 1)

4. TDI Metaphors:

(a) analytic psychology & semiotics: circumambulation (University of Cairo entrance exam);

(b) astrophysics: event horizon of a black hole;

(c) molecular biology or genomics: patches attaining systemic optimality through induction of local solutions. *

5. New Renaissance:

(a) new tech like JSTOR condenses and connects a second Cambrian Explosion this time of knowledge resulting from the scientific revolution that in 500 years (25 generations) has had a very visible and species specific outcome from 400,000,000 souls in 10 widely separated civilizations living hand to mouth and a tsunami away from destruction in Da Vinci’s 1500 C.E. to a global economy of 6 billion + today;

(b) this time, however, the new Renaissance Person will probably be a specialist called a generalist ‘knowing’ from outside disciplinary black holes much like Mannheim’s free floating intelligentsia (intellectual antithesis of the English Virtuosi) the change agent;

(c) but must remember Salvador Dali’s injunction to first master the masters before creating something ‘new’

6. Of Paradigms, Epistemes and Overlapping Temporal Gestalten

7. TDI as Ideology: i.e., the science of ideas or pragmatic epistemology – the disciplines exist, they are real, they are critical to the growth of human knowledge and hopefully understanding but nonetheless they are not enough!  They are a necessary but not a sufficient condition.  Some one, some band of scholars must provide us with ‘an overview’ of the noösphere

Exhibit 1

Trans-Disciplinary Event Horizon

 

* "The basic idea of the patch procedure is simple: take a hard, conflict-laden task in which many parts interact, and divide it into a quilt of nonoverlapping patches.  Try to optimize within each patch.  As this occurs, the couplings between parts in two patches across patch boundaries will mean that finding a “good” solution in one patch will change the problem to be solved by the part in the adjacent patches.  Since changes in each patch will alter the problems confronted by the neighboring patches, and the adaptive moves by those patches in turn will alter the problem faced by yet other patches, the system is just like our model coevolving ecosystems...  We are about to see that if the entire conflict-laden task is broken into the properly chosen patches, the coevolving system lies at a phase transition between order and chaos and rapidly finds very good solutions.  Patches, in short, may be a fundamental process we have evolved in our social systems, and perhaps elsewhere, to solve very hard problems." (Kauffman 1995, 252-253)