Interdisciplinary and Health

In this book, the authors provide a much-needed general theory of interdisciplinarity and relate it to health/wellbeing research and professional practice. In so doing they make it possible for practitioners of the different disciplines to communicate without contradiction or compromise, resolving the tensions that beset much interdisciplinary work.

Such a general theory is only possible if we assume that there is more to being (ontology) than empirical being (what we can measure directly). Therefore, the unique approach to interdisciplinarity applied in this book starts from ontology, namely that there is a multimechanismicity (a multiplicity of mechanisms) in open systems, and then moves to epistemology. By contrast, the mainstream approach, which fails to acknowledge ontology, is “unserious” and tends to result in a methodological hierarchy, unconducive of interdisciplinarity, in which empiricist science is overtly or tacitly assumed to be the superior version of science.

This book is primarily aimed at those people interested in improving health and wellbeing – such as researchers, policy-makers, educators, and general practitioners. However, it will also be useful to academics engaged in the broader academic debate on interdisciplinary metatheory.

Roy Bhaskar was the originator of the philosophy of critical realism and the author of many acclaimed and influential works including A Realist Theory of Science (1975); The Possibility of Naturalism (1979); Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (1986); Reclaiming Reality (1989); Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (1991); Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993); Reflections on Meta-Reality (2002); and From Science to Emancipation (2011).

Berth Danermark is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the School of Health Sciences, Örebro University, Sweden. He is also the Director of Doctoral Studies (and founder member) of the Swedish Institute of Disability Research.

Leigh Price is Senior Research Associate at the Environmental Learning and Research Centre, Rhodes University, South Africa, and Editor of the Journal of Critical Realism.