Studying water: reflections on the problems

and possibilities of interdisciplinary working

STEVE CONNELLY* and CLIVE ANDERSON†
* Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7ND, UK
† Department of Probability and Statistics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7RH, UK

Some of the barriers to interdisciplinary working are not between natural and social
scientists, but are philosophical rather than disciplinary. In this essay we explore the
implications of this for the production of knowledge intended to support effective human
intervention in a field such as the study of water catchments, and tentatively propose four
strategies for addressing these barriers. These are: (1) avoidance, through researchers with
different philosophies working alongside each other without integrating their knowledge;
(2) working in multidisciplinary but single-paradigm teams; (3) adopting common philo-
sophical ground, in which context we suggest critical realism as a potentially valuable
candidate; or (4) for researchers to develop common criteria for assessing the quality of
their work, even where they differ over philosophical fundamentals. Of these the last seems
likely to be most fruitful, and would require an interdisciplinary team to examine explicitly
their understanding and criteria for validity, to recognise similarities in their approaches
to generating well-grounded knowledge, and to be open-minded in their acceptance of
difference.

The ‘Water, environment and society’ (WES) seminars were premised on the ‘imperative
that the research agenda relating to the environment is informed by both science and
social science concerns’, and the recognition that ‘this may require the development of
new concepts and new methods of research’.1 Two elements are implicit here. One is that
in order to understand better how water catchments ‘work’ it is necessary to study their
physical and social elements and the interactions between these which are the focus of
policy-making. The other is that the interdisciplinary work required is challenging – a
challenge posed in terms of how sociologists, planners, ecologists and hydrologists, inter
alia, can work together to jointly produce knowledge across the divide between the social
and natural sciences.
However, observations and reflections on the seminars suggest that the more intractable
divides lie not between disciplines, but between scientific philosophical paradigms – that
is, more-or-less coherent positions on the nature of the world and how it can be known
by scientists. The major faultlines between paradigms do not lie conveniently between the
natural and social sciences but rather cut across them, dividing even those working on
apparently the same problem from within the same discipline. The principal relevant
distinction is between positivist approaches on the one hand, characterised by a belief in
an independent and objectively accessible world and by the pursuit of explanation through
general laws describing regularities in nature and/or society;2 and a range of challenges

DOI 10.1179/030801807X183669 INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2007, VOL. 32, NO. 3 213
© 2007 Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. Published by Maney on behalf of the Institute
214 Steve Connelly and Clive Anderson

to different philosophical and methodological elements of this position from within the
social and physical sciences.3
In this essay we explore the implications of differences of philosophy rather than
subject matter for interdisciplinary research, and we propose, albeit tentatively, ways of
addressing the barriers which may separate scientists working within different paradigms.
In doing this we are working from particular standpoints in the debates which characterise
the critiques of positivism. Steve is increasingly convinced that some form of realism pro-
vides a coherent approach to understanding the ways humans interact with each other
and the material world and thus gives a satisfying philosophical base for researching water
catchment management. Clive works largely within a probabilistic realist tradition in which
attempts to generalise experience recognise the random character of phenomena and the
role of probability in systematising attempts to learn about them. Although most of what
follows is not explicitly setting out a realist perspective, our understanding – and thus
presentation of – other positions is inevitably inflected by our personal positions in the
debates. In contrast, we also make an explicit claim that realism offers possible solutions
to some of the philosophical problems of interdisciplinary work.
As a useful example of successful interdisciplinary research in this field, consider the
study of upland processes described elsewhere in this issue by Prell et al.4 Their aim is to
develop a model – that is, a simplified representation of the complex reality of the phe-
nomena being studied, here aspects of an upland area’s functionality. Model construction
involves abstracting certain characteristics and processes of interest, which the model aims
to describe as accurately as possible. A ‘good’ model simplifies sufficiently to make the
complexity comprehensible, while also approximating reality closely enough to allow pre-
dictions about changes in the real world to be made.5 Working from different disciplinary
bases, many such models deal with particular aspects of the reality being studied: thus
change in upland areas can be modelled in terms of the social and behavioural character-
istics of land managers, relationships between hydrology and soil, changes in ecology
and so on. Recognition of the partiality of these bases, and the interconnectedness of the
various physical, biological and social processes in the real world, leads researchers such as
Prell et al. to attempt more holistic approaches which bring all these processes together
into a single predictive land management model.
While this is undoubtedly challenging in its technical aspects, the modellers do not
consider it to be fundamentally impossible. The different knowledges being brought
into the model are about different things, but are fundamentally similar in that the three
submodels (human, biophysical and biodiversity) share assumptions about the nature of
the world and how it can be known by scientists. That is, both the social and natural
scientists are working within the same paradigm. This is essentially positivistic in nature,
studying an objective world in which physical and social ‘things’ such as peatbogs and
land managers’ beliefs exist independently of the researchers, have properties which are
(relatively) stable and predictable and can be studied using methods which do not funda-
mentally change the situation. In principle, for all those involved there is an objective
truth, and good science – and in particular good modelling – is about reaching better
approximate descriptions of that truth.
Outside the disciplines represented in WES, much social science shares these assump-
tions about the nature of the world and how it can be known.6 Neoclassical economics is

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 Problems and possibilities of interdisciplinary working 215

perhaps pre-eminent, bridging disciplines effortlessly through providing a single measure,

‘economic value’, to which all social and physical variables can in principle be reduced.
Currently dominant approaches to analysing policy- and other decision-making are simi-
larly positivistic, privileging ideas of individuals holding relatively fixed, and measurable,
values, attitudes, interests and influence. A fine example is provided by the self-proclaimed
‘state of the art’ analysis of catchment management produced recently by Paul Sabatier and
his co-workers.7
There is, however, a longstanding and well recognised division within the social sciences
between approaches which adopt such a positivistic philosophy and those which reject
some or all of its fundamental tenets. Although this duality is far from clear cut, post-
positivist approaches share a rejection of the notion of unproblematic, objective access to
an independently knowable social world. This is grounded principally on the recognition
of the centrality of meaning (and often language) to human affairs, and the difference this
makes both in terms of interaction between subject and researcher, and to the reasons for
human activity.
For many post-positivists, social research in principle aims to understand the world
of the researched, to access ‘their truths’, and is not concerned with prediction and
generalisation based on notions of causal laws governing human affairs. In the context of
researching catchments, the focus of such interpretivist research would include such phe-
nomena as the understandings of the salient issues held by policy-makers, land managers,
researchers etc., how such individuals and groups construct knowledge, and how these
different knowledges and values interact and play out in terms of water and catchment
management. This approach rejects the idea that researchers can and do provide objective
knowledge about the social and material aspects of a catchment which is then available to
decision-makers and other stakeholders for discussion and use in a rational, technical way.
Instead, they favour a more situated understanding of how all knowledge about a water
catchment is socially constructed in a world imbued by power relationships.8
The contrast between these positions is serious – the primary distinction between
conceptualising knowledge as objective (and thus in principle unitary) and recognising
different knowledges creates a problem for inter-paradigm discussion which precedes debate
over the differing nature of the paradigms’ truth-claims. Talk of different possible philoso-
phies of science is remarkably difficult within a positivist worldview: if there is an indepen-
dent world, objectively knowable by science, then any alternative paradigm is by definition
not science. Hence such discussions are often marred by invective involving pejorative
use of ‘subjective’ and ‘unscientific’.9 The debate is asymmetric – from a non-positivistic
perspective, ‘positivistic social science’ becomes one potential subject of research amongst
many. However, the rejection of its tenets from the lofty perspective of understanding
positivistic scientists better than they know themselves is perhaps equally unrewarding as
a basis for interdisciplinary or inter-paradigmatic dialogue.
In principle, however, this need not present a problem for some kinds of interdisci-
plinary work. A positivist natural scientist and post-positivist social scientist can conve-
niently divide the physical and social worlds into distinct realms, with mutual recognition
that different kinds of knowledge are appropriate to the two, and work in parallel with
each other in studying different aspects of the same phenomena. So, land managers’ and

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216 Steve Connelly and Clive Anderson

policy-makers’ perceptions and understandings of their situations could be studied, with

explanations for action given in terms of the meanings they give to the biophysical world
in which they work, while a separate study could elucidate the objective reality of that
world – the nature of water flows through a catchment, the whereabouts and nature of
pollutant sources and so on.
More fundamental problems arise when a research project entails integration of different
kinds of knowledge – the creation of an argument based on different kinds of evidence for
a single set of conclusions. The issues this raises are not about the attitudes of researchers
to other forms of knowledge, but about the different kinds of knowledge themselves. This
is the situation that Prell et al. face, as they attempt to bring together very different fields
of study.
For them this is unproblematic, as noted above, since they share a positivistic paradigm
across the different disciplines. A post-positivistic social scientist would be another matter:
for consistency the project’s agent-based modelling requires objective and relatively stable
attitudes and values, which can be modelled as the values of shared variables between
research subjects. In contrast, an interpretive approach would certainly question the valid-
ity of such intersubjective standardisation, and might suggest that any claim for objective
assessment independent of the interaction between researcher and respondent was flawed.
Instead it would produce rich descriptions of how respondents understood their world,
in idiosyncratic and qualitative ways, which would not be amenable to modelling, at least
as traditionally understood.10 Although this oversimplifies the situation – given the many
variants of post-positivist thought – the general point is that interpretative data and
quantitative modelling of the familiar kind appear to be incompatible.
In contrast, it seems plausible that scientists working within a single paradigm – and so
sharing philosophical commitments to what is in and can be known about the world – may
well be able to span disciplinary divides, which are perhaps characterised more by subject
matter and methodology. A question then arises as to whether paradigmatic divides are
bridgeable in principle or in practice. The discussion above points to two possible ways
forward.
One is pragmatic: if two scientists agree to differ in their philosophical commitments,
can they agree on criteria for what counts as ‘good’ research, with which both would be
happy to be associated? The other is to address the basic philosophical issue: is there a way
of understanding the world which can accept knowledge of the physical and the social
in ways which respect at least some of the value that positivists and post-positivists see
in their respective paradigms? (The caveat is clearly crucial, since purists from each side
would see their paradigm as being adequate already!)
Traditionally, positivistic science has both a clear conception of what research is for and
clear criteria for quality. Inherent in the paradigm is the idea that seeking knowledge is
about establishing (as closely as possible) the objective truth about ‘the real world’. Good
research does this, and its validity can be assessed in a number of different dimensions,
all of which are necessary. Theoretical coherence is essential, as this reflects the order and
coherence of the world (internal validity); generalisability shows that the purported results
genuinely indicate regularities in the world, rather than chance configurations within the
research (external validity); the way in which the world is ‘measured’ must demonstrably
relate to the theoretical concepts being investigated (construct validity);11 and finally (with

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 Problems and possibilities of interdisciplinary working 217

some methodologies) the statistical analysis used must be appropriate to the nature of the
problem and the data (statistical validity).12
In contrast, post-positivistic social science has far less consensus over appropriate
validity criteria – and even aims – of research.13 While space precludes any discussion of
the breadth of views found within the range of positions opposed to the positivist para-
digm, it does seem to us that some progress could be made in finding analogues to these
dimensions of validity, and so promoting shared evaluation of research quality across the
paradigmatic divide. Post-positivists have significantly extended the concept of validity
itself to address broader issues of the social ‘quality’ of research beyond the narrower
positivist focus on truth. But from all except the most politically radical, cynically instru-
mental or solipsistic viewpoints, the concept must surely include some notion of research as
the search for knowledge about a world outside the researcher – otherwise it becomes
indistinguishable even in principle from fiction. An analogue of construct validity thus
seems relatively unproblematic: given a concern with finding out about the world, valid
research should be able to establish that it does assess those aspects of that world that it
claims to.14
Similarly, internal coherence and conceptual connection with other relevant theoretical
material seem essential for most social science to be meaningful and communicable
between researchers and others.15 Analogies with external validity are more problematic.
At one extreme, some post-positivistic scientists would disavow any concern with
generalisation beyond the truths of their research subjects, or the truths that they construct
together with their subjects. From a pragmatic perspective this position – a logical corol-
lary of the rejection of the positivistic grounding of generalisation in the assumption of
a law-governed world, which can be approximated through measurement and statistical
techniques – is odd. If the results of research have no ‘external’ relevance, then why should
an audience be interested, except in the results as a human interest story? The problem
here is in the narrowness of this conception of generalisation, which follows from an
overaccentuation of the binary divide between interpretation and positivism. This will
be returned to below, but at a pragmatic level research results would seem to have some
kind of external validity if they ‘make sense’, and can ‘throw light on’, help the reader
‘understand’, other situations which are judged to be relevantly similar enough for such
an extension of the findings. The process here is one of ‘analytic generalisation’ by either
researcher or research reader – of relating findings to some more abstract con-
ceptualisation which can in turn be applied in other settings.16 (The fourth dimension, of
statistical validity, has no obvious analogue outside this form of analysis – unless it lies in
some kind of ‘quality control’ over the methods of data collection and analysis used in
non-statistical research.)
None of the above seems particularly challenging. It flows simply from a recognition
that for an endeavour to ‘count as research’ it needs: to have some connection to a world
beyond the researcher; to make sense internally; to adopt methods and conceptualisations
which allow it to deliver results which are about what the researcher claims they are about;
and to generate understanding that has some wider relevance. Even if they differ funda-
mentally on the nature of their researched worlds, scientists from either side of the
paradigmatic divide might well be able to respect and work with the other if their research
demonstrably met these criteria.

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218 Steve Connelly and Clive Anderson

What remains is the potential problem of integrating different kinds of knowledge at

a more philosophical level. This does seem insuperable, since the paradigms simply are
different; it may, however, not be very important. Most researchers are not philosophers,
and the preceding pragmatic accommodation may well be sufficient to facilitate most inter-
paradigmatic working. However, we also wish to suggest, rather tentatively, that many
researchers in practice, if not in avowed principles (if they have such things), are
faithful neither to the tenets of a pure positivism nor its antithesis. The reasons are
complex, but observation suggests that natural scientists are not exposed to the ideas of
alternative paradigms, while many social scientists are taught that there are two approaches
within their fields – the positivistic and the interpretivist. However, decades ago the
purportedly ‘hardest’ of the physical sciences – physics – was challenged by and largely
accepted a third paradigm. Since then realism in its various forms (most usually ‘tran-
scendental’ in the physical sciences,17 and ‘critical’ in the social18) has made inroads to
varying degrees in different disciplines. It shares some aspects of both positivism and
interpretivism and also differs sharply from both. For realists, an independent world exists
of underlying structures, both social and physical, but these are not accessible through
direct, neutral observation – claims to knowledge about them are always tentative and
revisable. Structures have to be inferred from their effects – they have explanatory powers,
but, because the world is characterised by complex and usually unknowable interactions,
and every situation is unique, causation is rarely visible in a simple cause–effect way.
Generalisation follows an analytical approach: research results lead to inferences about
structures, and can be generalised to other situations that can be argued to involve similar
structures.
The relationship between realism, interpretation and the possibility of quantitative mod-
elling of subjective realities is complex and changing. Some realists accept that probability
theory gives a precise language to describe and expand the uncertain relationships between
structures and effects, dealing (through stochastic models) with individual cases as well
as with collective links. Moreover, developments in statistical inference give the means also
to quantify the uncertainty in our knowledge (epistemological uncertainty) as we learn
from experience, recognising the subjective nature of this kind of knowledge.19 From this
standpoint the positivist/interpretivist divide appears less wide – and the possibility of
overcoming the incompatibility between quantitative modelling and interpretative data that
was asserted above appears real.20
In any case realism allows for the existence of very different kinds of ‘things’ with
the same ontological status.21 The realist world encompasses socially constructed values
and meanings which can only be accessed through interpretation, alongside very physical
things such as peatbogs, as well as the interactions of these, mediated by physically embod-
ied individuals who influence the physical and social aspects of their world through action
and communication. While not without its problems (for example over its reliance on
in-principle unobservable explanatory entities), major debates (for instance over whether
reasons are causes or act in a different way) and technical challenges (for example over
ways to account for selection effects when epistemological uncertainty is quantified in
Bayesian inference), this paradigm appears to provide a coherent philosophical foundation
for interdisciplinary research. To return to the illustration of integrated modelling, the
question of whether the different kinds of structures and causal chains which constitute

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 Problems and possibilities of interdisciplinary working 219

the model can in fact be adequately modelled becomes an empirical question within this
paradigm, rather than a philosophical one.
To conclude, our contention is that at least some of the barriers which can make inter-
disciplinary research problematic derive from researchers’ differing, and usually implicit,
philosophies of science – the assumptions and beliefs they have about the world and how
they generate knowledge of it. What, then, are the implications of this for the production
of knowledge which will support effective human intervention in a field such as the study
of water catchments, where the nature of the issues involved seems to demand the bring-
ing together of insights from the physical, biological and social sciences? Four strategies
suggest themselves.
The simplest strategy is to avoid difficulties by using different approaches alongside
each other, enabling the reader to draw on different perspectives without the researchers
attempting to integrate their findings. The second emerges from the rather reassuring
claim that disciplinary boundaries do not necessarily raise philosophical problems for the
integration of knowledge. Multidisciplinary teams working within the same paradigm can
agree on the basic nature of the things that make up the world and what constitutes sci-
ence. This rather positive conclusion is tempered by the costs incurred by such an ap-
proach: most philosophically compatible social and natural science research will be positiv-
ist in nature, and thus find it difficult to draw on the insights generated by interpretivist
approaches to the social world.
Spanning this philosophical divide – and so opening up wider ranges of knowledge for
integration – is more problematic. The most thoroughgoing approach is for researchers
to adopt common philosophical ground, and we suggest, from an admittedly partial per-
spective, that critical realism does offer a way of bringing together some of the key elements
of traditionally antipathetic paradigms. However, we recognise that to expect this to be
a widespread or popular solution is unrealistic. Perhaps the most fruitful – and philosophi-
cally democratic – approach is for researchers to explore and develop common criteria
for assessing the validity of their work. Historically this has been problematic, given the
rivalries between the paradigms,22 but some grounds for making progress are set out
above. Pursuing this strategy would require an interdisciplinary team to explicitly examine
their understanding and criteria for validity, recognise similarities in their approaches
to generating well-grounded knowledge, and be open-minded in their acceptance of
difference. As post-positivist scientists we hope this might encourage further self-critical
examination of positivist positions, but suggest that this is not a necessity for productive
interdisciplinary research.

NOTES
1. ‘Water environment and society: what happens when you change the scale?’, www.shef.ac.uk/
environmentdivision/wes.
2. W. Outhwaite: New Philosophies of Social Science: Realism, Hermeneutics and Critical Theory; 1987, Basingstoke,
Palgrave Macmillan.
3. These positions will be elaborated on to some extent in the following discussion. Inevitably, however, no
justice can be done here to their full richness and complexity, and the discussion is necessarily heavily
oversimplified. The critiques have developed in a myriad ways within broad ‘interpretivist’ and ‘realist’
‘camps’, which share little more than their antipathy towards some or all of the tenets of positivism and
are themselves internally very heterogeneous. Even for the positivist paradigm there are no definitive

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220 Steve Connelly and Clive Anderson

canons establishing distinctive tenets to which adherents ‘sign up’, and the literature describing, differ-
entiating and defending the paradigms is vast. Yet in the WES seminars the basic distinctions became
manifest very quickly, in discussions between, for example, planners and biologists over the nature of
truth and knowledge.
4. C. Prell et al.: ‘If you have a hammer everything looks like a nail: ‘traditional’ versus participatory model
building’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2007, 32, 263–282.
5. H. Cramer: Mathematical Methods of Statistics; 1946, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
6. That is the linked ontological and epistemological assumptions which – together with related approaches to
methodology – constitute the philosophical basis of a scientific paradigm.
7. P. Sabatier, W. Focht, M. Lubell, Z. Trachtenberg, A. Vedlitz and M. Matlock (ed.): Swimming Upstream:
Collaborative Approaches to Watershed Management; 2005, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
8. M. Hajer and H. Wagenaar: ‘Introduction’, in Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the
Network Society, (ed. M. Hajer and H. Wagenaar), 1–32; 2003, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9. S. Kvale: ‘The social construction of validity’, Qualitative Inquiry, 1995, 1, 19–40.
10. Developments in the probabilistic modelling of qualitative observations (see A. E. Raftery: ‘Statistics in
sociology, 1950–2000’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2000, 95, 654–661) may offer richer
possibilities in future.
11. Consider, for example, whether patient waiting times for hospital treatment ‘actually’ measure the quality
of patient care: this question is one of construct validity.
12. For a thorough exposition of positivist validity criteria, see for example T. R. Black: Doing Quantitative
Research in the Social Sciences: An Integrated Approach to Research Design, Measurement and Statistics; 1999, London,
Sage.
13. S. Kvale: ‘The social construction of validity’ (see Note 9).
14. J. Mason: Qualitative Researching; 2002, London, Sage.
15. I. Hodder: ‘The interpretation of documents and material culture’, in Handbook of Qualitative Research,
(ed. N. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln), 703–715; 2000, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage.
16. A. Sayer: Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach, 2nd edn; 1992, London, Routledge.
17. R. Bhaskar: A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edn; 1978, Brighton, Harvester.
18. For example A. Sayer: Method in Social Science (see Note 16) and M. S. Archer: Realist Social Theory: The
Morphogenetic Approach; 1995, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
19. J. M. Bernardo and A. F. M. Smith: Bayesian Theory; 1994, Chichester, Wiley.
20. A. E. Raftery: ‘Statistics in sociology’ (see Note 10).
21. A. Morton: ‘The theory of knowledge: saving epistemology from the epistemologists’, in Philosophy of
Science Today, (ed. P. Clark and K. Hawley); 2003, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
22. S. Kvale: ‘The social construction of validity’ (see Note 9).

Steve Connelly (s.connelly@sheffield.ac.uk) lectures in the Department of Town and Regional Planning at the
University of Sheffield. His research focuses on sustainability and democracy in an age of governance through
partnership and participation, with current and recent work in South Africa, Egypt, Sheffield and the Peak
District National Park. He teaches research principles to doctoral students, and given the inherently interdis-
ciplinary nature of planning, this teaching necessarily involves consideration of the way different scientific
paradigms function. His interest in philosophy of science is longstanding, and he took his undergraduate
degree in physics and philosophy at Oxford as a student of the prominent realist philosopher Rom Harré.
Clive Anderson (c.w.anderson@sheffield.ac.uk) obtained his PhD in statistics in 1971 from Imperial College
London after studying mathematics at Cambridge University (BA 1966) and statistics at University College
London (MSc 1967). He became a Chartered Statistician in 1993. Before joining the Department of Probability
and Statistics at Sheffield in 1974, he lectured at Birkbeck College, London. His main research interests are in
statistical and probabilistic modelling and inference, particularly in connection with extreme values and envi-
ronmental issues, but he also works on problems in materials science, remote sensing and other applications.
He chaired the Royal Statistical Society’s Environmental Statistics Study Group 1996–2000, and acts as one of
the society’s media contacts on environmental matters.

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