Preface

Preamble

This book is a follow-up to the 2018 winter school's presentations entitled "Rencontres interdisciplinaires sur les systèmes complexes naturels et artificiels" (Interdisciplinary Meetings on Natural and Artificial Complex Systems) held each year in Rochebrune, France.

Interdisciplinarity is at the heart of the Rochebrune meetings and participants from all disciplines gather for five days in a unique place in the heart of the Alps to discuss a theme that changes every year. The result is a framework conducive to interdisciplinary exchange and questioning, whether on practices and methods or on objects. The disciplines present at Rochebrune generally agree that their object of study has the characteristics of complex systems, with the implication that the points of view between different disciplines on the same object may be interdependent or conducive to mutual enrichment. Rochebrune is therefore a privileged place for interdisciplinary dialogue, which makes it possible to shift disciplinary boundaries in a mutual enrichment of perspectives. The theme of Rochebrune 2018 was "Methods and Interdisciplinarity" and questioned a vision of disciplines trying to establish relationships between objects, methods, and finally points of view. This book includes a selection of the school's presentations.

Methods and interdisciplinarity

The theme of the Rochebrune thematic course on the study of artificial and natural complex systems was "Methods and Interdisciplinarity" in 2018. The school's stated aim was to understand the mechanisms of cooperation and hybridization between disciplines, and in particular the mechanisms for transferring methods or knowledge from one discipline to another. These are indeed central questions of interdisciplinarity. This growing need for new methods and cross-fertilized and multi-perspective knowledge on the same object of study and the hybridization process of one discipline with another are not independent, on the one hand, of the emergence of complex problems related to multiform objects of study and, on the other hand, on a stronger demand coming from society. This requires more cooperation between scientists than in the past. The complexity of an object of study comes precisely from the fact that the phenomena associated with it are not independent of each other. Interactions between different facets of the subject under study are central and make interdisciplinarity necessary as a corollary of complexity. For example, economists have long admitted that research on price formation can be done without considerations on the functioning of markets. The separation between sociologists involved in the study of interactions and economists involved in the study of price formation has prevailed for some time. However, the two phenomena, namely market structure and pricing, are not independent.

To define interdisciplinarity, it is already a matter of defining what a discipline is. Edgard Morin (1994) characterizes a scientific discipline by (translated from French):

the division and specialization of labor [.]. Although encompassed within a broader scientific framework, a discipline naturally tends towards autonomy, through the delimitation of its boundaries, the language it constitutes, the techniques it is led to develop or use, and possibly through its own specific theories.

The discipline therefore creates its object of study and designs its methods. Disciplinary confinement can be detrimental both because the object of study cannot be contained in the frame and concerns of a single discipline, but also because in setting its conceptual framework, a discipline neglects facets or solutions outside that framework. Nevertheless, despite an institutional segmentation of disciplines, their knowledge and methods are, alike biological mechanisms subject to perpetual evolution under the mechanisms of selection, hybridization, and mutation: less efficient theories are replaced by better ones and hybridization between disciplines enriches existing theories in successive steps without challenging however the boundaries of the discipline field; the novelty appears through mutation, that is a reinterpretation and adaptation in the new discipline of observations, methods or knowledge from another discipline. In this sense, interdisciplinarity is permanent and occurs mainly at the margins, in particular due to conformism and preservation instinct from the scientific community.

Economics is a good example of hybridization. Homo economicus, a seminal concept of microeconomics, is slowly adapting to integrate criticism coming from experimental psychology or Simon's concept of bounded rationality. Neoclassical theory is becoming more flexible by integrating the contribution coming from game theory or institutional economics. However, other radically different theories are sometimes proposed and there is then a coexistence without one theory taking precedence over the other. For example, the evolutionary theory of the firm, the philosophy of which is derived from Darwinian theory, proposes an alternative model to the rational theory of the firm.

Interdisciplinarity is therefore not simply a matter of a scientific research context comprising several disciplines. It is in contrast to the concept of multidisciplinarity, where each discipline operates in isolation, whereas in interdisciplinarity the desirable objective would be to answer a question by transcending disciplines in order to produce integrated knowledge. Barry et al. (2008) propose the following synthetic formulation on how to consider the relationships between disciplines:

Commonly, a distinction is made between multidisciplinarity - several disciplines cooperating but without altering their standard disciplinary frameworks - and interdisciplinarity - for which an effort is made to integrate or synthesize perspectives from different disciplines.

In the case of interdisciplinarity, it is indeed a question of considering a cross-fertilization between disciplines that is mutually enriching. Multidisciplinarity is a rapprochement of disciplines around an object either by complementarity of approaches or by complementary points of view on the object, but each one keeping its methods and frameworks. Interdisciplinarity would therefore consist of bringing together knowledge, methods, and experiments between disciplines, with the aim of making them coherent and articulating knowledge around the study of an object or question (Ramadier 2004). In return, each of the disciplines is enriched by this experience, either in its methods, theories or experiments.

Chapter 1 by Livet analyzes precisely the different forms that interdisciplinarity can take. He presents a variety of interdisciplinary modes of interaction through examples from the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies and proposes a typology of these modes of interaction. Notably, he shows cases of interdisciplinarity: by transfer of methods, with cross fertilization of points of view, with confrontation of theories through experimentation, with recursive loops (one discipline being the subject of studies of the other), with a combination of experimental methods, and finally interdisciplinarity by sharing fields/objects, but without sharing methods. Livet speaks, in this case, of interdisciplinarity by convergence on interrelated phenomena, which is a form of multidisciplinarity, each discipline keeping a certain autonomy from the others except that the results of one discipline affect the perspectives of the other disciplines.

In Chapter 2 Pumain analyzes the evolution of geography following the emergence of new processes related to computer science and digitization in her discipline. The main question concerns the epistemological transformations of geography due to the new practices associated with digitization. Pumain considers three main steps in this digitization: an instrumental use of computational tools by geography, particularly for data analysis and processing, then a partial assimilation of computer concepts adapted to geography, and finally a feedback interaction where dimensions of geography are used in computer productions. In Livet's categorization, it would be a question of interdisciplinarity through the interpenetration of methods.

The following two contributions (Chapters 3 and 4) show the importance of knowledge representation formalisms in the interdisciplinary dialogue. Going back to the categories of Pierre Livet, they involve both interactions between researchers by combining disciplines and the application of existing formalisms coming from one discipline to other fields of study.

Labeyrie, Caillon, Salpeteur and Thomas mobilize network analysis for the study of socio-ecological systems. Three examples are presented and discussed, showing how network analysis can articulate qualitative and quantitative approaches. The first case concerns the link between seed genetics and social anthropology with the aim of testing the effect of ethnolinguistic organization on seed circulation. In the second case, social network analysis allows food plants with different biocultural status within a community in Vanuatu to be monitored through trade networks. The third example examines how formal (migration groups, gender) or informal (friendships) relationships impact the transmission of local naturalistic knowledge within nomadic herder groups in India.

Müller dissects the process of building knowledge on the same object from several...