Interdisciplinary Research and Trans-disciplinary Validity Claims

Today, interdisciplinarity seems to become a matter of course and a promising answer for dealing with contemporary questions of science and/or society within a complex, uncertain and confusing world. Proponents of this idea would argue that this world appears to be much better accessible to interdisciplinary reflection than to ordinary disciplinary analysis.

Transdisciplinary science addresses problems of specifically practical concern that are raised by the general public or by politics. In this chapter we deal with “scientific expertise”, i.e., recommendations issued by scientists on problems that are relevant from an extra-scientific point of view. These recommendations are based on scientific knowledge, but directed at concrete problems. Expert recommendations address specific challenges and are expected to provide tailor-made proposals as to how to deal with these challenges. Scientific experts often give policy advice and draw on science for elaborating their recommendations. For instance, scientific experts decide about the efficacy of medical drugs or about the safety of tanning devices or cell phones (as the German radiation protection commission, the Strahlenschutzkommission, does). The usual self-understanding of scientific experts is that they bring scientific knowledge to bear on the particular case at hand. Expertise is often passed off as the mere tapping of the repository of knowledge or of simply applying scientific knowledge to experience.

Interdisciplinary scientific and scholarly work, in particular when it is occasioned by transdisciplinary goals, is largely aimed at advisory services: When technical or social developments are not just passively tolerated, not simply accepted as ‘the way things go’, rather when they should be actively shaped so that the desired consequences are most likely to occur, and the unwelcome consequences most likely avoided, then the need for professional and interdisciplinary advice increasingly arises in the question of the means that are to be taken. Thereby, it is a basic topos that advice-receiving clients emphasize as well as advice providers when they deal with their advisory services that good advising is a service that as smoothly as possible supports the client in the achievement of the goals he has set—according to his own preferences.