Transdisciplinarity, a term first introduced by Jean Piaget in 1970, is a research method which is radically distinct from interdisciplinarity; it concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond each individual discipline. Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the overarching unity of knowledge. The definition has been crystallised in 1994, when the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (CIRET) adopted the Charter of Transdisciplinarity, and has been refined by Basarab Nicolescu through three methodological postulates: the existence of levels of Reality (a concept formulated in 1982), the logic of the included middle, and complexity. In the presence of several levels of Reality the space between disciplines and beyond disciplines is full of information.
Basarab Nicolescu gave a definition of transdisciplinarity in his book "Manifesto of transdisciplinarity" (SUNY Press, New York, 2002), according to which transdisciplinarity is the new "in vivo" knowledge, founded on the following three postulates :
1. There are, in Nature and in our knowledge of Nature, different levels of Reality and, correspondingly, different levels of perception;
2. The passage from one level of Reality to another in insured by the logic of the included middle;
3. The structure of the totality of levels of Reality and perception is a complex structure: every level is what it is because all the levels exist at the same time.
transdisciplinarity
Subject
Transdisciplinarity, a term first introduced by Jean Piaget in 1970, is a research method which is radically distinct from interdisciplinarity; it concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond each individual discipline. Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the overarching unity of knowledge. The definition has been crystallised in 1994, when the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (CIRET) adopted the Charter of Transdisciplinarity, and has been refined by Basarab Nicolescu through three methodological postulates: the existence of levels of Reality (a concept formulated in 1982), the logic of the included middle, and complexity. In the presence of several levels of Reality the space between disciplines and beyond disciplines is full of information.
Basarab Nicolescu gave a definition of transdisciplinarity in his book "Manifesto of transdisciplinarity" (SUNY Press, New York, 2002), according to which transdisciplinarity is the new "in vivo" knowledge, founded on the following three postulates :
1. There are, in Nature and in our knowledge of Nature, different levels of Reality and, correspondingly, different levels of perception;
2. The passage from one level of Reality to another in insured by the logic of the included middle;
3. The structure of the totality of levels of Reality and perception is a complex structure: every level is what it is because all the levels exist at the same time.
