SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2022

My project investigates the epistemological foundations of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity is not a juxtaposition of views, but rather an integration of knowledge and methodology. There are two ways to interpret interdisciplinarity. The first is an epistemological interpretation, which defines interdisciplinarity as an epistemic capacity to integrate knowledge from at least two disciplines, enabling people to have a holistic view of the external world rather than a narrow perspective acquired from only one discipline. The second is a social-cognitive interpretation, which defines interdisciplinarity as an integrated methodology aiming to address complex practical problems related to public decision-making, which could not be achieved by referring to a single disciplinary approach. My project mainly analyses the foundations of the emergence of interdisciplinarity according to these two interpretations. My paper argues that humans’ innate ability to integrate justifies the epistemological foundation of interdisciplinarity, by referring to philosophical doctrines, cognitive science, and neural science. Meanwhile, I argue that the reasonableness of evolutionary psychology, human information behaviour, and the process of judgment aggregation justify the social-cognitive foundation of interdisciplinary. Moreover, my paper also provides a platform for further discussion on the epistemic and social-epistemological challenges and axiology of the practice of interdisciplinarity.