Some disciplines are worse in this respect than others. It seems that a number know absolutely nothing of the work done elsewhere and equally do not bother to consult it, making a non-science of its own and lacking in credibility.

When I studied history, it was clear the lecturers, some highly regarded considered that was enough and it was ridiculous to consider other views outside their own.

Contradicting results tend to be the most fascinating ones, since they often lead a new understanding about phenomena - what makes it being different can be a breakthrough.

But many disciplines tend to specialize so much in their own agenda that they sometimes ignore other works that delve into the same subject. It is even more strange when different disciplines have different names for notions and concepts that are pretty much the same. In such cases, disciplines become akin to languages and even if they are mostly written in English, the technical terminology often varies from area to area.

Its a taxonomic problem, more than anything else.

Try checking this book if you are interested: Lattuca (2001) Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary research and teaching among college and university faculty.

I also have a conference paper here that delves briefly into this issue.

Cheers!

André

Contradicting results tend to be the most fascinating ones, since they often lead a new understanding about phenomena - what makes it being different can be a breakthrough.

Oh that can certainly be the case, but it's not good when the contradiction arises, not because there are two competing theories which have roughly the same priority, but rather due to a lack of communication between fields of study.

I also have a conference paper here that delves briefly into this issue.

DOI?

Here it is, Daniel: Conference Paper Interdisciplinary Research in Social Sciences: a two way process?

In social sciences, research is about asking questions to reality, i.e. what we are trying to figure out. Sometimes the same question can lead to several different answers and that's how moderating variables arise. Doesn't mean any of them are wrong - or right, for that matter - only that very subtle aspects can lead to different results. Gender, age, qualifications, type of work, rural vs. urban, north vs. south, etc. Learning how such variables affect social facts is often what social research is all about.

When one discipline or theory claims P and another claims not-P, the words in P may be the same but might be interpreted differently or be about different levels of reality or explanation* or have a greater or lesser range of application.**

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*E.g. when an engineer is talking about an object's continuous solid surface he is not disagreeing with the physicist who says that objects are mostly empty space.

**E.g. Newtonian physics as a special case of Einsteinian physics.

J. André Guerreiro, that's where you simply have two competing theories that are both reasonable given the available data. I'm talking about an information disconnect between two fields, where one does not even consider the theory and evidence of the other, almost as if the researchers in field are on a different planet from the researchers in another.

I believe that results for a few reasons. One is the growing tendency for academics to over-specialize in one particular subject

I believe that results for a few reasons. One is the growing tendency for academics to over-specialize in one particular subject. Shorter courses means less time for authors, theories and different subjects from outside of one's core discipline. This tendency to narrow research fields has the downside of leaving several dark corners in one's academic instruction.

The second reason is due to several disciplines almost competing with each other and with their backs turn. Sometimes there's almost a tribal feel to disciplines, as they not only act as coercive institutions with their cannons, methods, theories and concepts, but dis-encourage experimentalism and deviance to the established practices. For example, even today Economists frown upon non-quantitative research, while anthropologists do the same with non-qualitative research. They "respect" them, as long as such things are done away from them.

The third reason is what I call the excess of compartmentalization in scientific areas like social sciences. They began as social sciences, then divided as disciplines (sociology, anthropology, psychology, geography, economy, political science, history, etc), then managed to create sub-disciplines (sociology of family, sociology of culture, sociology of knowledge, sociology of education, social psychology, organization psychology, clinical psychology, regional economy, political economy, etc), and now, the latest trend, is to specialize in subjects inside one's sub-discipline. The degree of focus into a specific problem is such that leaves researchers all but blind to the larger picture.

This has resulted in many disciplines not "talking" to each other and working concurrently about the same things without much cooperation being encouraged. Its even funnier when the same concept exists in two or three disciplines, with different names and researchers are barely aware of this. Knowledge is supposed to be cumulative, but you can only build upon what you know. If you are impelled to focus on a very narrow subject and work only from within your discipline, the relevant advances are sometimes missed and that sets things back years.

Of course many researchers don't follow this approach and are more than happy to engage science and research from an interdisciplinary point of view. There are even courses and institutions that encourage this, but normally its not the case. Universities and research centres have their own cannons and non-conformity is tolerated in these places as much as in any other...

At the same time, some subjects managed to skip this rather backward approach to science. Tourism studies, globalization studies, mobilities, etc, are all interdisciplinary field that don't partake in one discipline but gather contributions from all the available sources, even if some disciplines end up being more influential.

I hope this helps!

A good analysis, J. André Guerreiro

The more rigorous or scientific a subject is the less likely it is to have competing theories from other subjects. For example compare concepts in physics, chemistry and mathematics. Although there is considerable overlap among these three subjects, each subject complements the findings from another subject and rarely contradicts. This is not necessarily the case in the soft sciences, pseudo-sciences and non-sciences. Compartmentalization of fields unnecessarily into multiple fields and "specialization" in each of these mini-fields have resulted in researchers not doing a thorough literature review prior to starting their work. This can lead to competing and contradictory theories.

It would seem to be a problem especially when the different disciplines are asking identical questions about the same phenomena. Otherwise, each discipline, to the extent that each discipline has adequate foundational understandings, and the researchers are competent in such, are focussed on the particular aspects of reality that their discipline is focussed on. I assume that when different disciplines are making disparate claims about specific events, that the complexity of the events are being distorted or reduced.