Coping With Unknowns

Bammer, Gabriele, Disciplining Interdisciplinarity (2013) stresses that all research is imperfect; there are always unknowns, some of which we don’t even know we don’t know.

She diagrams various sorts of unknowns, and shows how their importance differs across disciplines.

In Ch. 13 Bammer outlines 6 strategies for coping with unknowns. These can be:

reduced

banished

accepted

surrendered to

exploited

denied.

She discusses the advantages of each.