Editing Interdisciplinarity (section)

==Development==
Although "interdisciplinary" and "interdisciplinarity" are frequently viewed as twentieth century terms, the concept has historical antecedents, most notably [[Greek philosophy]].<ref name="ausburg">{{cite book |last = Ausburg |first = Tanya |title=Becoming Interdisciplinary: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies |edition=2nd |location = New York |publisher=Kendall/Hunt Publishing |year=2006 }}</ref> [[Julie Thompson Klein]] attests that "the roots of the concepts lie in a number of ideas that resonate through modern discourse—the ideas of a unified science, general knowledge, synthesis and the integration of knowledge",<ref>{{cite book |last = Klein |first = Julie Thompson |title=Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice |url = https://archive.org/details/interdisciplinar00kleirich |url-access = registration |location=Detroit|publisher=Wayne State University |year = 1990 }}</ref> while Giles Gunn says that [[Ancient Greece|Greek]] [[historians]] and [[Playwright|dramatists]] took elements from other realms of knowledge (such as [[medicine]] or [[philosophy]]) to further understand their own material.<ref>{{cite book |last = Gunn |first = Giles |chapter=Interdisciplinary Studies |editor-last = Gibaldi |editor-first = J. |title = Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Language and Literatures|chapter-url = https://archive.org/details/introductiontosc00giba |chapter-url-access = registration |location=New York |publisher=Modern Language Association |year=1992 |pages = [https://archive.org/details/introductiontosc00giba/page/239 239–240] |isbn = 978-0873523851 }}</ref> The building of [[Roman roads]] required men who understood [[surveying]], [[material science]], [[logistics]] and several other disciplines. Any broadminded humanist project involves interdisciplinarity, and history shows a crowd of cases, as seventeenth-century Leibniz's task to create a system of universal justice, which required linguistics, economics, management, ethics, law philosophy, politics, and even sinology.<ref>{{cite journal|author=José Andrés-Gallego|title=Are Humanism and Mixed Methods Related? Leibniz's Universal (Chinese) Dream|journal=Journal of Mixed Methods Research|volume=29|issue=2|year=2015|pages=118–132|doi=10.1177/1558689813515332|s2cid=147266697}}</ref>

Interdisciplinary programs sometimes arise from a shared conviction that the traditional disciplines are unable or unwilling to address an important problem. For example, social science disciplines such as [[anthropology]] and [[sociology]] paid little attention to the social analysis of [[technology]] throughout most of the twentieth century. As a result, many social scientists with interests in technology have joined [[science, technology and society]] programs, which are typically staffed by scholars drawn from numerous disciplines. They may also arise from new research developments, such as [[nanotechnology]], which cannot be addressed without combining the approaches of two or more disciplines. Examples include [[quantum information processing]], an amalgamation of [[quantum physics]] and [[computer science]], and [[bioinformatics]], combining [[molecular biology]] with computer science. [[Sustainable development]] as a research area deals with problems requiring analysis and synthesis across economic, social and environmental spheres; often an integration of multiple social and natural science disciplines. Interdisciplinary research is also key to the study of health sciences, for example in studying optimal solutions to diseases.<ref>{{cite journal|author1=J.S. Edge|author2=S.J. Hoffman|author3=C.L. Ramirez|author4=S.J. Goldie|year=2013|title=Research and Development Priorities to Achieve the "Grand Convergence": An Initial Scan of Priority Research Areas for Public Health, Implementation Science and Innovative Financing for Neglected Diseases: Working Paper for the Lancet Commission on Investing in Health|location=London, England|journal=The Lancet|url=http://globalhealth2035.org/sites/default/files/working-papers/goldie-team-rd-cih-working-paper.pdf|access-date=31 July 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161022180542/http://globalhealth2035.org/sites/default/files/working-papers/goldie-team-rd-cih-working-paper.pdf|archive-date=22 October 2016|url-status=dead}}</ref> Some institutions of higher education offer accredited degree programs in Interdisciplinary Studies.

At another level, interdisciplinarity is seen as a remedy to the harmful effects of excessive specialization and isolation in [[information silo]]s. On some views, however, interdisciplinarity is entirely indebted to those who specialize in one field of study—that is, without specialists, interdisciplinarians would have no information and no leading experts to consult. Others place the focus of interdisciplinarity on the need to transcend disciplines, viewing excessive specialization as problematic both epistemologically and politically. When interdisciplinary collaboration or research results in new solutions to problems, much information is given back to the various disciplines involved. Therefore, both disciplinarians and interdisciplinarians may be seen in complementary relation to one another.