Domain-specific Explanatory Norms and Interdisciplinary Collaboration

This paper contributes resources from the philosophy of science to identify differences between explanatory norms across disciplines and how such differences affect interdisciplinary collaboration. The body of literature on explanatory norms and interdisciplinarity is rapidly growing (Marchionni 2013). However, there is still no consensus on a theoretical framework that allows us to compare norms across disciplines in a systematic manner. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework that enables to identify explanatory norms across fields and uses distance between explanatory norms as an indicator of patterns of interdisciplinary work. By pursuing these goals, this work promises to be theoretically significant and practically relevant. It contributes to the work on domain-specific explanatory norms; and provides recommendations for science-policy assessment of interdisciplinary science. This way, it shows the importance of grounding the design of institutional factors in philosophy of science work.