Reflections on interdisciplinary research in practice: Epistemological conflicts

Oftentimes, interdisciplinary research is heralded as an effective way to approach complex problems from a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives. However, many scholars of interdisciplinary research agree that doing interdisciplinary work is difficult and prone to failure. In this paper, we argue that this difficulty is better understood in light of a tension between the aim of interdisciplinary integration on the one hand, and the goal of normative epistemic pluralism on the other. This tension, which we believe takes place at the above-disciplines level of interdisciplinary research teams and projects, leads to difficulties in interdisciplinary research in practice. Additionally, we argue that the conflicts on the local, practical level where disciplinary researchers work together in multidisciplinary research teams - which we term the between-disciplines level - are caused by researchers insufficiently acknowledging the differences in (non-)fundamental epistemic goods that vary per academic discipline. In teams that do interdisciplinary research, it can occur that disciplines are brought together that have very different underlying epistemic presuppositions (or epistemic systems) that value different forms of research, methodologies and aims. We illustrate the difficulties of interdisciplinary research with the case study of the Mill Town Example, an interdisciplinary project that was deemed a failure by its participants, in order to sketch what epistemological conflicts look like in practice on the between-disciplines level. In order to address differences in how disciplinary researchers value (non-)fundamental epistemic goods, we suggest various forms of epistemic work that offer strategies to make epistemological conflicts manageable in interdisciplinary research.