The war of definitions
How transdisciplinarity was born
Transdisciplinarity is a relatively young approach: it emerged seven centuries later than disciplinarity, due to the Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980).
The word itself first appeared in France, in 1970, in the talks of Jean Piaget, Erich Jantsch and André Lichnerowicz, at the international workshop “Interdisciplinarity –Teaching and Research Problems in Universities”, organized by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in collaboration with the French Ministry of National Education and University of Nice1.
In his contribution, Piaget gives the following description of transdisciplinarity: "Finally, we hope to see succeeding to the stage of interdisciplinary relations a superior stage, which should be "transdisciplinary", i.e. which will not be limited to recognize the interactions and or reciprocities between the specialized researches, but which will locate these links inside a total system without stable boundaries between the disciplines"2. This description is vague, but has the merit of pointing to a new space of knowledge “without stable boundaries between the disciplines”. However, the idea of a “total system” opens the trap of transforming transdisciplinarity in a super- or hyperdiscipline, a