Cross-disciplinary research (CDR) is an increasingly important part of the contemporary research 'landscape'. Despite its growing importance there remain a large number of barriers to successful CDR and many of these barriers are poorly understood. In particular there are challenges at the conceptual and communicative levels that have received relatively little attention. In this paper it is argued that these challenges are appropriate topics of analysis for philosophers. Appropriate methodologies for such an inquiry are considered and the case is made that agent based models (ABM’s) are an appropriate and under utilized resource. Current research using an ABM approach to philosophical issues in CDR is then described.