A field of knowledge becomes intellectually consequential not when it succeeds in including everything but when it establishes what cannot be transferred without alteration. The familiar ambition of transdisciplinarity is to bring separated forms of expertise into contact; its less comfortable question is whether an encounter should end in a common account at all. Pohl and colleagues make integration an interactive process rather than an achieved unity, allowing asymmetry, revision and unresolved plurality to remain constitutive. Scholz and colleagues show why this distinction matters: different thought-styles, cultures, roles, representational codes and practical interests cannot be adequately described as elements of a single cognitive synthesis. Yet Talbi and van Woerden identify a contradiction at the heart of such work. A project may value epistemic diversity while imposing integration as the compulsory form of success, thereby negating the differences it initially sought.
