Knowledge Bridging: Vision, Justifications, and Pathways
Abstract
The specialized academic regulation has dominated the production of scientific knowledge
during a long period of the twentieth century. Specialized communities seemed to
settle within their intellectual and institutional boundaries pursuing and publishing more
specialized and detailed knowledge about their respective fields. However, the interest
in accurate specialized knowledge engendered a poor perception of social phenomena,
as it does not consider their comprehensive goals and nature. There is an increasing interest
in interdisciplinary communications to reach a level of re-integration of knowledge
allowing a more balanced approach to study and research social phenomena while taking
into consideration their comprehensive goals and nature on the one hand, and their details
and components on the other hand, especially in interdisciplinary studies. However,
interdisciplinary studies seem to suffer from confusion and lack of clarity in defining the
concepts and the know-how of the integration process between the visions of specialties
to create an integrated and comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon. In this context,
this study proposes the concept of bridging (tajseer) as a framework for knowledge
communication that includes a number of critical benchmarks, especially those related
to problem solving. The study also contributes to displaying the bridging between scientific
disciplines, which results in three tracks: the bridging exploration track, the bridging
synthetic track, and the transdisciplinary track. In order to reach these results, the study
benefits from a revision of the philosophical assumptions of social sciences suggesting a
critical realist foundation for such efforts as an alternative to the substantive and hermeneutical
basis of social sciences.
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