ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an outline of critical realism's main ontological arguments for interdisciplinarity. There is also the notion of crossdisciplinary research or inter-professional cooperation. Such crossdisciplinarity is vital for successful interdisciplinary work at the epistemological level as members of the interdisciplinary team must be able to communicate effectively with each other in crossdisciplinary understanding. This, together with the need for creative transdisciplinarity, necessitates types of education and socialization of the interdisciplinary research worker that are significantly different from those currently found in orthodox monodisciplinarity. Interdisciplinary research is not a question of a choice between one thing and another; it is a question of meshing different things into the explanatory schema. From the point of view of critical realism, applied research must be interdisciplinary because phenomena occur in the open-system context of the world.
