TheorySpeak

You know, I love academia as much as the next person, but sometimes it takes itself a little too seriously. Sometimes, it is straight talking out of its ass, as in the case below. What we have here is a conference invitation that a friend of mine recently received via email. I laughed when I first read it because it was so over-the-top in its theoryspeak. Just for fun, I have taken the email and paraphrased it in plain English for the edification of all.

TheorySpeak: "Interdisciplinarity draws its strength from the ontological view that reality may be explained from various different angles that permit interpretation of phenomena in a more complete way without becoming mere eclecticism. From an epistemological point of view, interdisciplinarity attempts to unify the field of action of the disciplines that study social facts and phenomena. It has no intention of achieving a priori integration of the paradigms of knowledge. Rather, its efforts are aimed at the enrichment and rational exchanging of the methods of various disciplines, to some extent independently of the categories specific to each science, in order to improve study of reality."

Translation: “There’s more than one way of looking at the world. These points of view may or may not complement each other, but since there’s no way to really prove anything, all we can do is get together and talk about the different ways we academics maintain our job security through the creation of elaborate and contrived jargons. Maybe our jargons will overlap somewhat, thereby giving us more than a snowball’s chance in hell of actually figuring something out about the world.

TheorySpeak: Transdisciplinarity, for its part, simultaneously covers what lies between disciplines, cuts across various disciplines or goes beyond any discipline. Its aim is to understand the present world, one essential feature of which is the unity of knowledge. Transdisciplinary research is in no way antagonistic to multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research, but rather is complementary to it.

Translation: “However, what about the areas that fall outside our jargons? These are the areas we must seek to annex in order to further justify our self-importance. Under no circumstances must the layperson suspect that we really don’t know what the heck we’re saying. We must find ways to bring everything under our philosophical jurisdiction, so that no outsider feels remotely qualified to comment on anything – ever.”

TheorySpeak: As Basarab Nicolescu has pointed out, disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are four arrows for one and the same bow: the bow of knowledge.

Translation: “As Basarab Nicolescu has pointed out, there are lots of different ways of learning things about stuff.”

TheorySpeak: Our objective is to make the Eighth Isko Spain Congress a meeting devoted to reflection and applications in the area of transdisciplinary organization of knowledge.

Translation: “Let’s get together in Spain, drink a lot, and toast ourselves into a wine-induced stupor!”