A manifesto for interdisciplinarity founded on the complexity frame of reference

This chapter begins by drawing on the Gulbenkian report on the future of the social sciences (1996) to trace the historic emergence of the distinctively social sciences across the last 200 years. It shows how this was more than a matter of disciplinary differentiation but was, in large part, based on a distinction made between hard sciences which could work in a positivist Newtonian framework and soft sciences which could not do so in a direct fashion. One response in the social sciences was to develop quantitative and even experimental methods and to claim respectability by signing up to the positivist programme. However, particularly in anthropology and sociology, alongside historical sociology, there was always resistance to this because qualitative researchers had different programmes of investigation, better equipped to engage with the complexity of the social world. This division was replicated in the applied fields which drew on the base disciplines in developing work towards application. The Gulbenkian report engaged exactly with complexity showing how the complexity turn across science was a way of getting past these issues and developing a post-disciplinary science of the kind necessary to engage with a complex world. We continue by defining some of the key language of complexity in relation to systems, emergence, and non-linearity and introducing both the important distinction after Morin (2008) between general and restricted complexity and the proposal for a synthesis between the scientific ontology of complexity and Bhaskarian critical realism proposed by Reed and Harvey (1992). The chapter concludes by asserting the importance of the recognition of values in scientific practice and asserting that what we will call the complexity frame of reference is an essential intellectual tool in confronting the problems facing the human race on this planet.

Classical mechanics · Epistemology · Frame (networking) · Frame of reference · Manifesto · Physics · Political science · Reference frame · Computer Science · Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration · Law · Philosophy