(Association for Interdisciplinary Studies, 1986) Miller, Raymond C.; Klein, Julie Thompson
The five-part theoretical scheme that Erich Jantsch devised to describe
interrelations among disciplines provides interdisciplinarians with a sound
framework for interdisciplinary knowledge. However, when Jantsch introduces the
concept of human purpose into the category of "interdisciplinarity," he departs from
the foundational ground of structuralist epistemology and builds his scheme for both
"interdisciplinarity" and "transdisciplinarity" without a foundational theory of
epistemology. Support for Jantsch's scheme can be found in Michael Polanyi's
theory of knowledge, since the two-level structure of Jantsch's "interdisciplinarity" is
analogous to the structure of Polanyi's theory of tacit knowing. Comparison of these
two theories of knowledge also demonstrates how interdisciplinary knowledge is the
knowledge of new meaning created by the integration of concepts and ideas from
different disciplines.