Inquiry across disciplines: Communicating questions

Successful cross-disciplinary inquiry requires the construction of technologies which allow us to traverse the boundaries erected between disciplines through their own technologies of language, concepts, instruments, and practices. Inquiry is then both a driving force for technology construction and the further application of the technology so constructed. Thus, as collaborative technologies develop, they help to define what "inquiry" means in multidisciplinary contexts. This paper reports on a study of how questions are posed, how metaphors are used, and how learning occurs within and between specialties as a result of such cross-disciplinary inquiry.

The paper develops the framework of pragmatic technology, drawing from the philosophical and historical work of J. Dewey, W. James, and C. S. Peirce, as well as more recent research on the social uses and implications of technologies. "Technologies" in this sense include concepts, metaphors, practices, and organizational relationships, as well as the more usual category of artifacts. This framework is then employed in an analysis of how technologies enact disciplinary boundary crossing.

Two senses of "pragmatic technology" as boundary tool are developed. One is the common language notion of technology that works to meet real human needs, accommodates to users, and is situated in time, place, and setting. In this sense, a technology is an a priori means we employ to meet some need, e.g., to communicate with someone trained in a different discipline or working in a different institution. A contrasting sense is that in which a technology is the resultant means for resolving a problematic situation. This a posteriori view positions the technology as the outcome of problem-solving, the way that some border crossing was actually accomplished. Viewed this way, technologies are both means of action and forms of understanding. For those engaged in inquiry, they provide the means to cross the disciplinary boundaries, and for the analyst, they provide a window into multidisciplinary inquiry.