I would brand those mentioned ephemeral relations as multi-disciplinary. Concerning trans-D, there are indeed two traditions or poles in the usage of the term: as integration of research in some problem solving tasks; or as unity of knowledge. The first is more used in German speaking countries. In Göttingen, a conference was held in 2003 to elucidate the different usages of multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinarity and many different uses were referred.

To my understanding, if no change is produced in the methods and knowledge ground I would term it multi-D. That is the case of so many projects in what has been called big-science, for instance, astronautics (I believe there may be an interest from those holding the power to instrumentally use the knowledge to produce what they are interested in, but controlling the limited understanding of each party so they can use it again). Let us consider on the other side cybernetics as a successful case of trans-disciplinarity, indeed involved in the astronautics project. We can find here some kind of agreement considering the outer behaviour of the systems, however each involved discipline held a different understanding about the inner. This could be a reason for the lack of success on the understanding of intelligence or intentionality, despite of the success on the self-regulation mechanisms, as well as the disagreement among different constructivist schools when the boundaries of the outer behaviour was overpassed.

In the inter-disciplinarity, as I understand it, there is an endeavour to grasp the understanding of the others, while keeping the own point of view to some extend. It assumes a limitation on the vision held by each other, since the blind angles may vary from one viewpoint to the other. Thus, understanding the other implies changing one’s viewpoint (i.e. empathising). This might bring a change in the former viewpoint when one who has understood other viewpoint tries to comes back to the original one. The complete return is not possible because the child is there, and so on…