In the brief history of ideas of knowledge generation reveals three milestones.

The first: Plato, who suggested that knowledge, is generated mainly through deductive reasoning.

The second: Aristotle, who suggested that knowledge, is generated by observation as well as by deductive reasoning.

The third: Descartes, who in establishing the modern philosophy of scientific method recognizes that experimentation, in addition to observation and deductive reasoning, is a means of generation of new knowledge.

Descartes said ". . . the infinity of experiments I require, and which it is impossible for me to make without the assistance of others . . . ,'' others have offered their assistance during the last 300 or more years by applying the scientific method and mechanistic philosophy to form disciplines which in turn were enormously successful in generating new knowledge in their respective domains.
The success of these disciplines is so great that they now produce "great mountains of information'' which humans cannot keep up with. The systematic and implicit influence of the mechanistic philosophy brought us to the current information explosion and to a compartmentalization of knowledge.
This compartmentalization put us into a position to have great difficulty connecting results even in closely related fields. This is exactly where the Cartesian-mechanistic worldview exhausted its effectiveness and its methods began to fail and hence transdisciplinary approaches.