The role of discourses in multidisciplinarity

This paper deals with the role of discourses and dialogues in multidisciplinary processes and their relation to engineering education. Discourses are an effective method in shaping multidisciplinary dialogues. Awareness of multidisciplinary reflection is growing due to two effects: Increasing specialization of the engineering disciplines and increasing impact of technology on daily life. Many engineering and technological problems are no longer solvable within a single discipline. Moreover, boundary conditions from the societal and ethical context become more and more important. Transdisciplinar reflection is needed to achieve the appropriate solution, satisfying both, the technological and social constraints. Multidisciplinary practice requires knowledge about the different ways of intradisciplinar hermeneutics and knowledge management. Technological hermeneutics is one of the keys in understanding value-management, reasoning and reflection in engineering sciences and practice. Further, basic knowledge about ethical reasoning and reflection techniques of human sciences will be helpful in understanding of contextual problems and their normative treatments. Two levels of multidisciplinarity are examined: Interdisciplinarity between experts coming from different scientific disciplines working on the same issue, and secondly, communication between experts and non-experts belonging to stakeholder groups, e.g. in technology assessment.