What COVID-19 may teach us about interdisciplinarity.

### Summary box\n\nInterdisciplinarity is often cast as a matter of different disciplines looking at a shared object from different perspectives such that each discipline highlights a different aspect of that object. The task at hand then consists in putting pieces of a puzzle together so as to make apparent the entire picture, see figure 1.\n\n\n\nFigure 1 \nInterdisciplinarity imagined as combining pieces of a puzzle.\n\n\n\nHowever, when different disciplines congregate, the sum total is often not an easily assembled coherent picture. On the contrary, the various conclusions reached by different disciplines may well point in different directions. Visual metaphors like ‘perspectives’ and ‘pieces of a puzzle’ do not aid the understanding of the tensions and clashes that interdisciplinarity tends to involve. In this article, we, therefore, propose a different epistemological take on interdisciplinarity. Building on decades of research into medical practices, we use COVID-19 as an example to argue that more useful than the above metaphors is stating that different disciplines handle reality in different ways.1–3 They draw on different techniques, address different concerns and operationalise …