Interdisciplinarity as an instrument of communicative action

Abstract

This paper is based on the perception of the need for a holistic consideration of the epistemological elements involved in the construction of knowledge in contemporary time, having as key elements, both the requirement of a citizen's awareness of the individual and the use of an instrument that enhances this awareness, to recognize the utopian character of this project. The concept of interdisciplinarity (and its multiple meanings) was understood as a recurrent application resource in the development and expansion of human and scientific knowledge. The articulation of these premises propose the consideration of the term Interdisciplinarity as an instrument-technology of communicative action, capable of mediating the world of life and the socio-institutional systems, promoting the encounter (or resulting from the encounter) of intersubjectivities of subjects acting in those two spaces. In order to verify the pertinence of this proposition, the hermeneutic-dialectical analysis was applied on national and international texts that approach the concept of Interdisciplinarity from the perspective of several theorists of the Philosophy and Sociology field. The arguments about this theme were based on the following basic concepts in the following affiliations: Communicative Action, Rationality, and Pretensions of Validity, by Jürgen Habermas; and, of Interdisciplinarity, in Leo Apostel et al. – with considerations of Japiassu and Alvarenga et al. We concluded that the environment of the public sphere is potentially a space of interdisciplinary construction of knowledge and that its conscientious nature could benefit the wider promotion of Interdisciplinarity in differentiated spaces.