Abstract
The sciences and humanities have long been regarded as discrete intellectual cultures, separated by a sharp epistemic divide. Recently, however, turns toward "transdisciplinarity" have intimated the growing importance of overcoming disciplinary boundaries. The Rhetoric of Inquiry and digital humanities are two transdisciplinary projects that have attempted, respectively, to bring humanistic inquiry to the sciences, and to bring scientific inquiry to the humanities. This paper attempts to trace the parallel genealogies of both projects in an attempt to theorize some common traits of theory in a transdisciplinary mode. I suggest that articulating these projects with one another enables us to suppose that building transdisciplinary theory will entail a heightened reflexivity concerned with questions about scope, methods, and epistemic values.
Highlights
The sciences and humanities have long been regarded as discrete intellectual cultures, separated by a sharp epistemic divide
Self-reflexivity is a demonstrable characteristic of the two transdisciplinary projects I have discussed, this does not mean that where self-reflexivity exists so too necessarily does transdisciplinary theory
A key implication of this paper’s discussion, is that self-reflexivity is a necessary condition of transdisciplinary theory
Summary
Reach of rhetoric permeating science, technology, and medicine. While it may still be premature to proclaim a transdisciplinary “turn” in the field, it is surely possible through these and other examples to identify a growing institutional attentiveness to rhetoric as a valuable means to overcome the innumerable divides that partition our pluralistic world. My argument is that theory in a transdisciplinary mode does not require articulating, ab ovo, a “new” language or paradigm—a “third culture—through which divergent cultures might be united, but in practice involves “importing” or “exporting” one culture’s metatheoretical assumptions into another’s to form something new. This dialectic occurs through theory building discourses that take on conspicuous self-reflexivity: an inward gaze of metadiscourse directed in three areas. By better understanding the chiasmatic relationship between two major transdisciplinary projects, we might improve our ways of thinking about the actual practice and limitations of building theory in a transdisciplinarity mode
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