Metaphor: a tool for developing a community of 'knowing' between asymmetric disciplinary cultures

Disciplines are contingent conceptual frameworks defined and legitimised as such in terms of their mutual relations. However, although necessarily provisional, the core sets of beliefs and practices constituting these frameworks are fundamental for they reflect evolving cultures each with their own systems of meaning. They thus embody practices and perceptions that conflict, not only with other disciplines but also within themselves. Nonetheless, shared synoptic elements imply that some disciplines are more closely related than others. These common elements will come to the fore in interdisciplinary undertakings in which each is involved thus facilitating communication between them. But, in interdisciplinary challenges that involve disciplines so asymmetric as to appear incommensurable there is need to develop a common understanding if any meaningful communication is to take place. The nature of text enables that process. Participating simultaneously in several genres' texts cannot be reduced to a single interpretive framework. Because genres are complex, open and dynamic, coherent and yet partly constituting each other, their implicit 'interdiscursivity' offers a way in which apparently incommensurable beliefs might mutually be understood. This is the context in which it is suggested that the role of metaphor in facilitating a hermeneutic progression from one context to the other is central: by allowing complex processes to be mutually explored a 'community of understanding' is shaped in an ongoing conversation reflective of the fundamentally dialogical character of society as a whole.

Published abstract.

Disciplines are contingent conceptual frameworks defined and legitimised as such in terms of their mutual relations. However, although necessarily provisional, the core sets of beliefs and practices constituting these frameworks are fundamental for they reflect evolving cultures each with their own systems of meaning. They thus embody practices and perceptions that conflict, not only with other disciplines but also within themselves. Nonetheless, shared synoptic elements imply that some disciplines are more closely related than others. These common elements will come to the fore in ...  [+] Show more