Knowledge, complexity, power: social semiotics as metadiscipline

This article contributes to this special journal issue by developing concepts and methods from social semiotics to analyse, interpret and comment on text and ideas from the issue plus an RFS-project on interdisciplinarity, knowledge transfer and methodology convergence within and across STEM and HASS disciplines. It follows and extends this project’s focus on three disciplines, politics, biology and linguistics, and connects them with emerging features of contemporary knowledge production, especially complex, problematic relations between scientific and non-scientific knowledges, and new forms of operations of power on knowledge.

The article develops a modified Kuhnian framework to argue that this project can be understood as a significant intervention into a currently unfolding crisis and opportunity in knowledge. It diagnoses crises of knowledge that stem from inadequacies in traditional disciplinary organisations when confronted by challenges and “wicked problems” arising from the scale and complexity of a hyper-connected world. It sees new opportunities arising from new forms of disciplinary organization, constituted by metadisciplinary structures and functions, within a Kuhnian framework of paradigms and metaparadigms. It uses social semiotics as tool and case study, to show how disciplines can evolve into metadisciplines, and demonstrate the productivity of metadisciplines within meta- paradigm processes.