On The Genealogy Of Interdisciplinary

The reason that why there have been no literature reviews of interdisciplinary research while more and more interdisciplinary research papers arise in the past30years is that the meaning of the term is various and usage of the term is hybrid. As the academics and funding agencies place higher and higher value on interdisciplinary research and interdisciplinary activities grows faster and faster, it is necessary to gain a clear idea of the meaning of interdisciplinary. Scholars from various academic fields pay attention to the interdisciplinary research and draw conclusions from their respective disciplinary perspectives; nevertheless the meaning of interdisciplinary is vague up to now. In order to make it clear, the paper investigates "interdisciplinary" as a whole rather than understands it as a combination of "inter" and "discipline" and gives a comprehensive overview of interdisciplinary literatures with academic genealogy.Background and main topics of interdisciplinary discourse were emerged as constructing the genealogy of interdisciplinary based on the contributions of interdisciplinary award winners, interdisciplinary literatures, and interdisciplinary scholars. Then, the usage of "interdisciplinary" could be classified into two types that one is an instrument of researching method in scientific knowledge most happened in natural science, while the other is an objective of theoretical inquire with the name of interdisciplinary studies which is an emerging field of necessity to be paid attention for the goal of the paper. Interdisciplinarity is the essence in interdisciplinary studies which means multiple connections between disciplines. But only part of it could be described from certain disciplinary perspective and different conclusions always make conflicts. As a result, the structure of interdisciplinary and the reason why expression of interdisciplinary was not clear was figured out.The gaps between different languages, different knowledge and different disciplines make it difficult for people from different disciplines to communicate and operate. To response to the questions of reality and to develop themselves, the fields of scientific knowledge gradually broke their boundaries or frontier. The classification of knowledge based on discipline was replaced by characteristics of knowledge as interdisciplinarity which lead up to a shift of world view. The formation of concept of interdisciplinary was evolved as development of many interdisciplinary practices of education and research within and after the Second World War. The general fashion of interdisciplinary is the instrumental borrowing and the basic types of it are multidisciplinary, crossdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in terms of relationship of related disciplines.Since the interdisciplinarity is a new world view beyond disciplinary scope, people from different disciplines understand it from different perspectives and elaborate it in different vocabularies. That is the reason that why the meaning of it was not clear for such a long time. As a new world view, interdisciplinarity will prove to be a catalyst of a new philosophy, philosophy of interdisciplinarity.At last, as a response to the new worldview of interdisciplinarity and the philosophical consideration of it, a philosophy of interdisciplinarity is going to be established, which emphasizes knowledge of interdisciplinarity in ontology, pays attention to problem-solving in epistemology, and lays stress on process of knowledge integration in methodology. Besides the contribution of philosophy of science to interpretation of meaning of interdisciplinary, Chinese philosophy is valuable in illustration of classification of knowledge and connection between disciplines.