Trans-scientific frameworks of knowing: complementarity views of the different types of human knowledge<FNR>*</FNR><FN>The present paper is a further development of the groundwork in Brier (1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999a). </FN>.

The paper attempts to develop a non-reductionistic and transdisciplinary view on human knowing in the light of the growing development of transdisciplinary practices and sciences. Medicine is one of the oldest; ecology and information science are some of the newer examples of radical transdisciplinarity. I discuss the lack of a recognized place and value of phenomenological knowledge in relation to the general mechanistic scientific ontology that still seems to be the only generally accepted background for the transdisciplinary areas to build on. Ontologically we cannot say much about reality except that it is very complex and dynamic, but still has structures and causal relations of a certain stability, which can be modelled mathematically. We further have to admit that there are aspects of reality that are beyond measuring. I suggest that the dualistic idea of transcendental and eternal mathematical natural laws and an algorithmic programme behind intelligence and language is rejected for its lack of ability to include the phenomenological and existential perspective of science and the practical knowledge beyond words. Instead I am promoting an epistemology, which sees science as only one aspect of our knowledge and sees human knowledge as going beyond language. An opening for the phenomenological aspect is then created in our modern scientistic and mechanistic metaphysics. I suggest a view of knowledge seen as self-organized signification systems based on metaphysical frameworks in social practice. The interpretation of sign in a systematized knowledge framework is actually where the medical sciences started in the classical Greek tradition of Hippocrates. This non-reductionistic framework promises to open towards a non-Cartesian transdisciplinary understanding of the basis for the generation and communication of knowledge in society without giving up what we have gained through the rigour and the methods of the sciences and the logic of philosophical analysis. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]