Transdisciplinarity
Based on Wikipedia: Transdisciplinarity
The Problem With Knowing Things in Boxes
Here's a puzzle that keeps researchers up at night: the most pressing problems humanity faces—climate change, pandemic preparedness, the ethics of artificial intelligence—refuse to stay inside the neat boxes we've built for understanding the world. A virologist can tell you how a pathogen spreads. An economist can model the costs of lockdowns. A sociologist can explain why people resist masks. But who can hold all of that together and actually solve the problem?
This is where transdisciplinarity enters the picture. And if you've never heard the word before, don't worry—it's one of those terms that academics love precisely because it sounds important and slightly mysterious. But the idea behind it is both practical and profound.
Three Ways to Cross Boundaries
To understand transdisciplinarity, you first need to understand what it's not. So let's draw some distinctions.
Multidisciplinarity is like inviting experts from different fields to the same dinner party. The biologist sits next to the philosopher, and the economist chats with the artist. They might share interesting conversations, but at the end of the night, everyone goes home unchanged. Each discipline keeps its own methods, its own assumptions, its own way of seeing the world. They've studied the same problem, but separately.
Interdisciplinarity goes further. Now the dinner guests are actually cooking together, combining ingredients from each other's kitchens to create something new. When biologists and computer scientists merged their expertise, they created bioinformatics—a field that neither could have built alone. Interdisciplinarity creates something greater than the sum of its parts, but it still happens within academia's walls.
Transdisciplinarity tears down the walls entirely. It doesn't just combine academic disciplines—it brings in farmers, patients, community organizers, indigenous elders, and anyone else who has relevant knowledge about a problem. The prefix "trans" means "across" and "beyond," and that's exactly what this approach does: it moves across disciplinary boundaries and beyond the university altogether.
Why This Matters Now
The Belmont Forum, an international partnership of funding organizations, put it this way: transdisciplinary research enables "inputs and scoping across scientific and non-scientific stakeholder communities." That's bureaucratic language for a revolutionary idea—that the people affected by a problem often know things that scientists don't.
Consider a public health crisis in a rural community. Medical researchers might develop an intervention that's clinically perfect but culturally impossible. A transdisciplinary approach would include community members from the beginning, shaping research questions around their lived experience and practical constraints. The result might be less elegant in a laboratory sense but far more effective in the messy reality of human lives.
This isn't about replacing expertise with folk wisdom. It's about recognizing that different kinds of knowledge are good for different things, and that solving complex problems usually requires all of them.
The Three Questions
German-speaking academics have developed a particularly rigorous approach to transdisciplinarity, and they've identified three fundamental questions that this method can help answer.
First: What is actually happening, and why? This is what they call "system knowledge." It means understanding the causes of current problems and predicting where they're heading. You need scientists for this, but you also need people on the ground who can tell you what the data doesn't capture.
Second: What should we be aiming for? This is "target knowledge," and it's fundamentally about values. Science can tell you what's possible, but communities have to decide what's desirable. A purely technical approach might optimize for efficiency when people actually care more about fairness or tradition or beauty.
Third: How do we get there? This is "transformation knowledge"—the practical wisdom about how to actually change a problematic situation. Academic experts often underestimate how hard this is. The people who have to implement solutions and live with the consequences tend to know better.
A Unity of Knowledge
There's another meaning of transdisciplinarity, one that's more philosophical and ambitious. This version doesn't just want to solve problems—it wants to heal the fragmentation of human understanding itself.
The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget introduced this usage in 1970. He was troubled by how knowledge had splintered into hundreds of specialized fields, each with its own vocabulary, methods, and institutional turf. Piaget imagined a form of inquiry that could move between these fragments and reveal their underlying unity.
In 1994, a group of researchers took this vision seriously enough to write it down. At a former convent in Arrábida, Portugal, they adopted the Charter of Transdisciplinarity, which declares that one of the imperatives of our time is "the overarching unity of knowledge." This isn't mysticism—or rather, it's not only mysticism. It's a recognition that reality doesn't actually divide itself into physics and biology and psychology. Those divisions are useful tools for investigation, but they can become prisons if we forget that nature is seamlessly whole.
Levels of Reality
The Romanian physicist and philosopher Basarab Nicolescu has developed the most systematic theory of transdisciplinarity. His framework rests on three pillars.
First, he argues that reality has multiple levels. This isn't a metaphor. Quantum physics, for instance, reveals a level of reality where particles can be in two places at once, where observation affects outcome, where the classical rules of cause and effect break down. This quantum level is just as real as the everyday level where you can reliably predict that dropped objects fall—but the two levels operate by different logics.
Second, Nicolescu invokes something called "the logic of the included middle." Classical logic says that something is either A or not-A, with no middle ground. But at boundaries between levels of reality, this either-or thinking fails. A particle can be both wave and particle. A person can be both healthy and sick, depending on which level you're examining. Transdisciplinary thinking embraces these apparent contradictions instead of forcing them into artificial resolution.
Third, there is complexity itself—the recognition that most interesting phenomena involve so many interacting parts that they can't be reduced to simple explanations. Weather, ecosystems, economies, human minds—all of these are complex systems that defy the reductionist approach of breaking things into pieces and studying them separately.
What It Takes
Transdisciplinary work is genuinely hard. It's not enough to gather experts in a room and hope they'll collaborate. Several formidable obstacles stand in the way.
Language is the first barrier. Every field develops its own specialized vocabulary, and the same word can mean completely different things in different disciplines. "Theory" means one thing to a physicist, another to a literary critic, and something else entirely to a practicing musician. Real transdisciplinary conversation requires patient translation, and sometimes the invention of new terms that don't carry the baggage of any single discipline.
Then there's the sheer volume of information. No human can master every relevant field. The researchers who do this work well aren't necessarily the ones who know the most—they're the ones who know how to moderate discussions, mediate conflicts, and create associations between ideas that wouldn't otherwise meet.
Power dynamics also complicate things. In a room with academic experts and community members, whose knowledge counts? Whose questions get priority? Transdisciplinary research aspires to give equal weight to every perspective, but achieving this in practice requires constant vigilance against the tendency of credentials and institutional authority to dominate.
Surprising Connections
Some of the most fascinating transdisciplinary work is happening at unexpected intersections.
In Latin America, researchers are combining "Big History"—the scientific story of the universe from the Big Bang to the present—with the ancestral wisdom of indigenous peoples. The scholar Javier Collado, working in Ecuador, studies how scientific knowledge and shamanic traditions might illuminate each other. This isn't about reducing one to the other or claiming they're secretly the same. It's about recognizing that indigenous communities have accumulated millennia of practical knowledge about local ecosystems, medicinal plants, and sustainable living that modern science is only beginning to appreciate.
Universities in Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, and Argentina are now teaching Big History in ways that integrate scientific disciplines with spiritual experiences, artistic expression, and emotional intelligence—dimensions that positivist science deliberately excluded but that remain central to how most humans actually make sense of their lives.
In healthcare, transdisciplinary approaches are dissolving the boundaries between traditionally separate fields to address problems that none could solve alone. Public health researchers increasingly recognize that human health can't be separated from ecosystem health, that medical treatment can't be separated from social conditions, that individual bodies can't be separated from the communities that sustain them.
The Arts Join In
Perhaps surprisingly, some of the most sophisticated transdisciplinary thinking is happening in the arts and humanities.
The Planetary Collegium, an international network of artists and researchers, explicitly pursues "the development of transdisciplinary discourse in the convergence of art, science, technology and consciousness research." This might sound like academic pretension, but the work it produces often reveals connections that more conventional research misses.
Consider a study of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett that draws on visual arts, music theory, and cognitive science to understand his creative process. Beckett himself famously resisted interpretation—when asked what his plays meant, he insisted that they meant exactly what they showed, no more and no less. But understanding how he worked, and how his work affects audiences, requires tools from many domains at once.
Education Transformed
If transdisciplinary thinking is valuable, how do you teach it?
Universities around the world are experimenting with answers. University College London offers bachelor's and master's degrees in "Arts and Sciences" that deliberately cross traditional boundaries. The University of Hong Kong has developed a Common Core Curriculum meant to give all students, regardless of major, a shared foundation in multiple ways of knowing. The University of Technology Sydney has created an entire Transdisciplinary School.
These programs share some common features. They emphasize problems over disciplines—students might study climate change or artificial intelligence or urban development, drawing on whatever fields prove useful rather than staying within predetermined boundaries. They often require collaboration across areas of expertise. And they tend to involve what educators call "higher domains of cognitive abilities"—not just memorizing facts but synthesizing, evaluating, and creating.
There's neuroscience behind this approach. Learning that makes connections across domains strengthens the brain's capacity for association and transfer. It builds what researchers call "better neural networking for lifelong learning"—the ability to keep making sense of new information throughout one's life, not just within the narrow track of one's original training.
A Matrix for Human Knowledge
The biologist Niko Tinbergen—who won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work on animal behavior—developed a framework that illuminates what transdisciplinary organization of knowledge might look like.
Tinbergen identified four fundamental questions that biological research can ask about any behavior: What causes it in the immediate sense? How does it develop over an organism's lifetime? What survival value does it serve? And how did it evolve over the history of the species? These four questions can be asked at any level of organization, from cells to organs to individuals to groups.
When you cross these four questions against multiple levels of analysis, you get a matrix—a grid that can locate any piece of biological research in relation to every other piece. The ethologist Gerhard Medicus extended this framework to all the human sciences, creating what he calls the "bio-psycho-social orientation framework."
This might sound abstract, but the practical value is enormous. It allows researchers to see what's missing, what connections haven't been made, what questions haven't been asked. It makes visible the gaps between disciplines and the bridges that could be built.
The Argentine Perspective
One of the clearest articulations of transdisciplinary thinking comes from the Argentine professional Pablo Tigani, who describes it as "the art of combining several sciences in one person."
A transdisciplinary thinker, in Tigani's view, is someone trained in multiple academic disciplines who has managed to merge all that knowledge "into one thick wire." That unified cable of understanding can then be used to solve problems that are themselves composed of many problems—the kind of tangled challenges where pulling on one thread affects all the others.
The key phrase in Tigani's definition is "the total resolution of a problem without leaving any loose thread." Traditional disciplinary approaches tend to solve the parts they can see while ignoring or creating new problems elsewhere. A traffic engineer might solve congestion by building a new highway, only to induce more driving and worse congestion within a decade. A transdisciplinary approach would consider urban planning, economics, psychology, environmental science, and community values together, looking for solutions that don't simply displace problems from one domain to another.
The Common Good
There's an ethical dimension to transdisciplinarity that's easy to miss. The German framework explicitly requires that transdisciplinary practices "promote the common good." This isn't optional or decorative. It's constitutive of the approach.
The reasoning is that purely technical problem-solving, however clever, can serve narrow interests at the expense of broader ones. When research questions are defined only by those with power—whether government agencies, corporations, or academic institutions—the answers will tend to serve those interests. Transdisciplinary research, by including diverse stakeholders in defining problems and evaluating solutions, builds ethical consideration into the very structure of inquiry.
This connects to a long philosophical tradition. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the seventeenth-century polymath who independently invented calculus and made contributions to philosophy, physics, and dozens of other fields, explicitly aimed to create a universal system of justice through the integration of different sciences. He believed that bringing different forms of knowledge together wasn't just intellectually satisfying—it was morally necessary for building a just society.
The Future of Learning
UNESCO and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have both endorsed transdisciplinarity as an important aim of education. The Global Education Magazine, supported by both organizations, published a striking formulation of why:
Transdisciplinarity represents the capable germ to promote an endogenous development of the evolutionary spirit of internal critical consciousness, where religion and science are complementary. Respect, solidarity and cooperation should be global standards for the entire human development with no boundaries.
That's dense language, but the core idea is clear: just as biodiversity enables the emergence of new species, cultural and intellectual diversity enables new forms of human flourishing. Monocultures are fragile, whether we're talking about corn fields or curricula. The transdisciplinary vision is of education that cultivates many ways of knowing, not as competitors but as complements.
Where This Leads
If transdisciplinarity is right, then the way we currently organize universities, fund research, train professionals, and credential experts may be fundamentally misaligned with our actual needs.
Consider how academic careers work. Success means becoming more specialized, not less. A physicist who spends time learning anthropology is usually seen as diluting their expertise rather than enriching it. Tenure committees reward depth, not breadth. Grant agencies fund research within defined disciplines because that's what peer reviewers know how to evaluate.
Yet the problems we face—climate change, emerging diseases, the societal effects of artificial intelligence, the challenge of governance in an era of rapid technological change—are precisely the problems that disciplinary research struggles with. They're not chemistry problems or economics problems or ethics problems. They're all of these at once, and more besides.
Transdisciplinarity suggests that we need new institutions, new career paths, new ways of validating knowledge. Not to replace the disciplines—their focused expertise remains essential—but to create spaces where disciplinary knowledge can be woven together with other forms of understanding in service of problems that refuse to stay in their boxes.
The dinner party metaphor breaks down here. What we need isn't guests who cook together and then go home. We need communities that live together, learning each other's languages, sharing each other's burdens, and building something that none could build alone.