Reflective Interdisciplinarity in Practice: Integrating Biology and Philosophy in Studies of Individualization

Marie I. Kaiser , Anton Killin, Barbara A. Caspers, Jürgen Gadau, Sylvia Kaiser, Joachim Kurtz, Caroline Müller, S. Helene Richter

Interdisciplinary research is widely acknowledged as a valuable means of knowledge production and as crucial for addressing complex scientific and societal problems. Interdisciplinary research takes many forms, and this article offers a novel case study of a distinctive form of interdisciplinarity, reflective interdisciplinarity. The article analyzes interdisciplinary research undertaken by philosophers of biology and empirically working biologists studying individualization. This kind of interdisciplinarity is reflective because biology is the target domain that philosophers of biology (and philosophically-minded biologists) reflect upon – as opposed to interdisciplinarity that occurs, for example, when insights from multiple distinct research domains are integrated. To analyze our case study, an analytic framework is developed that expands the framework of Katri Huutoniemi and colleagues. The developed framework distinguishes four dimensions of interdisciplinarity: objects of interdisciplinary research, interdisciplinary research activities, communication of interdisciplinary results, and personal, institutional, and other conditions of interdisciplinary research. The case study shows, first, that reflective interdisciplinarity can involve deeply immersive and cooperative interdisciplinary research processes (‘inquiry-embedded integration’) that include a form of knowledge-producing inquiry through which novel epistemic products emerge from joint commitments and goals, shared research questions, and intensive, collaborative discursive practices. The article adapts Margaret Gilbert’s notion of a plural subject in characterizing inquiry-embedded integration. Second, the analysis of the case study demonstrates how communicative choices, together with institutional and normative conditions, are partially constitutive of the interdisciplinary process. They shape the content of interdisciplinary products and play decisive roles in interdisciplinary activities such as knowledge integration. Finally, because the case study comprises the authors’ own research processes and publications, the analysis demonstrates that self-reflexive, qualitative analysis of interdisciplinary practice provides a valuable means of theorizing about interdisciplinarity with potential to offer transferable insights.