Rolf Hvidtfeldt is postdoctoral fellow at the Humanomics Research Centre at Aalborg University in Denmark. His research is mainly focused on the philosophies of science evaluation, scientific communication, and conflicts of perspective. Currently he is working on a project focused on mapping the various ways in which research (in a broad sense) affects (in a broad sense) society at large.
He has recently published the book The Structure of Interdisciplinary Science in which he seeks to develop a method for examining epistemic aspects of interdisciplinary collaborations. The following blogpost briefly summarises key elements of ch. 8 of this book, which is a case study picked from schizophrenia research.
In the The Structure of Interdisciplinary Science I develop a method, approach-based analysis, for studying interdisciplinary science in deep detail. Chapter 8 of the book is a case study in which this method is applied to a case of interdisciplinary research. The case in question is part of an ongoing research programme, EASE – short for Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience, in which philosophical phenomenology is combined with more traditional (psychiatric and psychopathological) approaches to schizophrenia research. The core ambition of EASE is to link schizophrenia to certain disturbances of basic structures of consciousness. Intuitively, this seems reasonable, since schizophrenia seems to involve obviously abnormal subjective experiences.
Capturing the subjective experience of what it is like to suffer from schizophrenia would certainly enrich our best representations of schizophrenia considerably. And further, if specific disturbances in structures of consciousness could be determined, and these could be shown to be causally related to symptoms of schizophrenia, this ought to attract a lot of attention in psychopathological research. There is little doubt, that such a finding would have considerable impact on future developments in psychiatric nosology and diagnostics.