Metacognition and Reflection by Interdisciplinary Experts: Insights from Cognitive Science and Philosophy

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their learning and acquisition of a set of mental representations or knowledge structures. Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations, experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks, process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of “Prompts or Questions for Metacognition” that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article

Ethnic Diversity and Ethnic Strife: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

The objective of this paper is to present an overview of ethnicity, ethnic strife and its consequences, as seen from the perspective of the disciplines of economics, political science, social anthropology and sociology. What exactly is ethnicity--how is it to be defined, characterized and measured? What exactly are the causal links from ethnicity so defined to its presumed consequences, including tension and violence? What are the feedback loops from the consequences of ethnic divisions back to these divisions themselves? How can policy, if at all, mitigate ethnic divisions and ethnic conflict? Finally, what role does interdisciplinarity have in helping to understand ethnicity and ethnic strife, and how can interdisciplinary collaboration be enhanced? These are the questions which this paper takes up and deals with in sequence.Ethnicity, Conflict, Interdisciplinary Approaches, International Development, International Relations/Trade,

Second-person Perspective inInterdisciplinary Research: A Cognitive Approach for Understanding and Improving the Dynamics ofCollaborative Research Teams

In this paper, we argue that to reverse the excess of specialization and to create room for interdisciplinary crossfertilization, it seems necessary to move the existing epistemic plurality towards acollaborative process of social cognition. In order to achieve this, we propose to extend the psychological notion of joint attention towards what we call joint intellectual attention. This special kind of joint attention involves ashared awareness of sharing the cognitive process of knowledge. We claim that if an interdisciplinary research team aspires to work collaboratively, it is essential for the researchers to jointly focus their attention towards acommon object and establish asecondperson relatedness among them. We consider some of the intellectual dispositions or virtues fostered by joint intellectual attention that facilitate interdisciplinary exchange and explore some of the practical consequences of this cognitive approach to interdisciplinarity for education and research

Tracking the Objects of the Psychopathology On Interdisciplinarity of Psychopathology on the Margins of Historia polskiego szaleństwa

This paper is a loose commentary on Marcinów’s book (2017). The commentary is focused on the objects of psychopathological investigations and the role of psychology / psychiatry tension in the process of singling out, tracking, and describing them. As a consequence, there are limitations of collaborative and integrative efforts between psychologists and psychiatrists where questions of psychopathology are concerned

Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy

The modern university can trace its roots to Kant's call for enlightened self-determination, with education aiming to produce an informed and responsible body of citizens. As the university evolved, specialized areas of investigation emerged, enabling ever more precise research and increasingly nuanced arguments. In recent decades, however, challenges to the hegemony of disciplines have arisen, partly in response to a perceived need for the university to focus greater energy on its public vocation—teaching and the dissemination of knowledge. Valences of Interdisciplinarity presents essays by an international array of scholars committed to enhancing our understanding of the theoretical underpinnings and the practical realities of interdisciplinary teaching and research. What is, and what should be, motivating our reflections on (and practice of) approaches that transcend the conventional boundaries of discipline? And in adopting such transdisciplinary approaches, how do we safeguard critical methods and academic rigour? Reflecting on the obstacles they have encountered both as thinkers and as educators, the authors map out innovative new directions for the interdisciplinary project. Together, the essays promise to set the standards of the debate about interdisciplinarity for years to come

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis dissertation aims to define the field of ecological planning. It uses interdisciplinary, mixed methods research to advance the understanding of theory, practice, and process at the intersection of science and the built environment. In theory, this dissertation defines ecological planning in terms of the "ecological paradigm": a concept elaborated by scholars of environmental history. This concept ties together the implicit theory of ecological planning, as described by experts within the field, and makes that theory explicit in one rigorous, coherent, interwoven analysis. As we will see, ecological planning is at the leading edge of a temporal, accretive, and aspirational shift to this paradigm, as both science and urbanism move towards one another into a new inter- or transdisciplinary space. In practice, this dissertation identifies the points of consensus that characterize research and application at the intersection of biophysical science and the built environment. It draws on the insights of expert scientists and urbanists, from both academia and professional practice, whose work focuses on that intersection. Their key points of agreement include principles for ecological planning practice, policies and governance structures, direct applications, the elements of successful projects, and the intricacies of interdisciplinary and collaborative work. In process, this dissertation creates a new conceptual framework for ecological planning which is holistic, nonlinear, dynamic, and collaborative. That framework synthesizes the workflow of diverse ecological planning experts, to show how processes of science and urbanism may become further integrated. It weaves the preceding theoretical and practical perspectives together, defining ecological planning as a form of transdisciplinary praxis. Using this new definition, the dissertation then assess the current state of ecological planning and makes recommendations for the field to realize its full potential, as the social-ecological future of planning in a social-ecological world

Exploring Links between Conversational Agent Design Challenges and Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Recent years have seen a steady rise in the popularity and use of Conversational Agents (CA) for different applications, well before the more immediate impact of large language models. This rise has been accompanied by an extensive exploration and documentation of the challenges of designing and creating conversational agents. Focusing on a recent scoping review of the socio-technical challenges of CA creation, this opinion paper calls for an examination of the extent to which interdisciplinary collaboration (IDC) challenges might contribute towards socio-technical CA design challenges. The paper proposes a taxonomy of CA design challenges using IDC as a lens, and proposes practical strategies to overcome them which complement existing design principles. The paper invites future work to empirically verify suggested conceptual links and apply the proposed strategies within the space of CA design to evaluate their effectiveness