EPISTEMOLOGICAL ISSUES IN INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH

The aim of the article is to document the methodological shortcomings, or even errors, that are in evidence in the research aspiring to the notion of interdisciplinary ones. The principal thesis on which the author bases her theoretical disquisition and critique states that a sound theoretical interpretation may be arrived at only through consistent methodological procedure. The authors claims that epistemological and methodological ambiguity of a statement has a negative impact on the quality and cognitive effectiveness of an academic discourse. The analysis does not include research oriented towards practical application, where efficacy in technology or social engineering is the goal. Cognitive self-determination and systematic methodological procedure constitute foundation of explication, whose task is always to provide a selection of convincing intellectual arguments. It performs two fundamental functions: the worldview-forming one, which is characteristic of a given period, and the communicative one, which benefits both the researchers combining diverse scientific approaches in the creative process as well as the addressees. The author has found that the methodological minimum which applies to every theoretician seeking recognition of their interpretation of reality should comprise five components: lucid criteria of description, definitions of basic notions, references to pertinent works of predecessors, methodological framework (which determines the strategy of interpreting empirical data and stipulates the rules of arriving at conclusions), substantiation of arguments without the claim of being an ontological or objectively understood truth. Those five interlocking elements of each methodology (for any given paradigm) will always affect the structure of the theory and decide whether it is clear as well as potentially attractive and useful for the addressees. Above all, however, it will determine the collaboration of several researchers or one, who combine several different scientific perspectives. In the successive subchapters the author presents four types of interdisciplinary narratives and reconstructs their methodological background. Respectively, these are: contamination, expressionism associated with narrativism or performativeness, strategic violence and compilation. This last form meets the five indicated methodological conditions. The analysed field is humanistic geography in various combinations with philosophy, sociology and ecology. In the main, the author discusses the concepts of Michel Maffesoli,Yi-Fu Tuan, Thor Hagerstrand, Anthony Giddens, Tommy Carlstein and Martin Heidegger as well as the currently negative trend in Polish cultural anthropology which poses a threat to the theoretical interdisciplinary initiatives.In the paper, the author summarizes two basic types of methodologies which are characteristic of the humanities, including social sciences, and sciences as such, i.e. anti-naturalism and naturalism. Then she goes on to compare their differences, pointing to the inability of arriving at a reconciled and uniform paradigm at a theoretical level. At the same time, Angutek argues that in various interdisciplinary projects the theoretical constraints are overlooked in practice, and the rapprochement of both branches is successfully pursued at the level of high technological and communicative efficiency. The discussed theoretical incompatibilities and the practical effective combination and application of knowledge from different fields are demonstrated on the examples taken from humanistic geography by Tommy Carlstein and Yi-Fu Tuan, as well as from Anthony Giddens’s sociological application of this geography. The author concludes that classical theoretical discourses are not relevant, while practical interdisciplinary projects overcome that gap, yielding new descriptive terminology.Studia Europaea Gnesnensi