2 - Transdisciplinarity

Summary

Benchmarks

The Disciplinary Relations of Jean Piaget and Andre Lichnerowicz in the 1970s

The contribution of Jean Piaget and André Lichnerowicz to transdisciplinarity began with the 1970 event and extended for some time until each one of them embraced their main areas of interest, for which they became known. Biologist Piaget dedicated his whole life to studying the process of knowledge acquisition, especially by children. Lichnerowicz was dedicated to the study of differential geometry and was recognized for his contribution in the field, for example, he chaired the Lichnerowicz Commission, established to analyse the pedagogical project of teaching mathematics.

In the early 1970s, they were both involved in teaching and learning issues of science, and Piaget, in particular, was aware of initiatives in the scientific community for the debate on disciplinarity, including the Unity of Science movement from the first half of the twentieth century (1922–1936), founded by a group of scientists and philosophers who met regularly at the University of Vienna (hence it was called the Vienna Circle, also known as the ‘Ernst Mach Society’). The movement argued that there should be a unitary set of physical premises from which the regularities of all reality could be derived.

During the 1970 event, this vision was contained in the reflections of his work ‘L’épistémologie des relations interdisciplinaires’, as well as in the necessary distinctions between interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, the results of which led him, in fact, to coin the term and the first concept of transdisciplinarity:

Finally, we hope to see succeeding to the stage of interdisciplinary relations a superior stage, which should be ‘transdisciplinary’, i.e., which will not be limited to recognize the interactions and or reciprocities between the specialized researches, but which will locate these links inside a total system without stable boundaries between the disciplines. (Piaget 1972, p. 144)

Throughout the Conference, it is evident that the educator saw transdisciplinarity as a new form of disciplinary relations, more integrative than interdisciplinarity, going beyond and even being the result of interdisciplinarity. Nicolescu (2006) pointed out that ‘this description is vague, but has the merit of pointing to a new space of knowledge “without stable boundaries between the disciplines” ‘ (p. 1).