Transdiscipline

From EvaluationWiki

A discipline that serves many other disciplines as a tool-for example, statistics and logic are very important transdisciplines-while also having an autonomous status as a discipline in its own right-for example, there are researchers who work only on developing statistics itself, as a branch of mathematics, as well as applied statisticians who work only on statistics in some other field, e.g., demographics. While many disciplines, e.g., physics, are useful at some points in many other disciplines, a transdiscipline is pervasive, ubiquitous, in the disciplines it serves; often the client discipline could not possibly have achieved its main-or most of its-accomplishments without the assistance of the transdiscipline. It has been suggested that evaluation is another major transdiscipline, since all disciplines depend on it to evaluate the entities within their own purview such as their theories, data sources, instruments, and methods, as well as their students, practitioners, journals, books, and researchers; and of course, it is a subject in its own right, as the existence of this glossary and much of the other material on its website demonstrate.