On Transdisciplinarity

by Maria Odete Madeira

No researcher can rigorously identify the border that separates the interdisciplinary from the transdisciplinary work. In question are matters such as individual and collective experiences, processual and methodological convergences and integration of the disciplinary knowledge.

The plurality of the senses and meanings, synthesized by each concept, trigger self-referent systemic lines of fugue that can oscillate between the interdisciplinarity and the transdisciplinarity.

Thus, any transdisciplinary exercise is conditioned by a structuring systemic uncertainty, in regards to the interpretation, comprehension and verbalization of the signs and respective meanings that emerge from the borders of each system involved in the processes.

The great challenge that is placed to the transdisciplinary work is, precisely, the development of techniques and technologies that allow the researchers to capture, in the systems, all the available information about the identity of each of these systems, as well as to capture the respective autopoietic processes involved in the systems’ development, evolution and growth.