Scientific community metaphor
Encyclopedia
In computer science
, the Scientific Community Metaphor is a metaphor
used to aid understanding scientific communities
. The first publications on the Scientific Community Metaphor in 1981 and 1982 involved the development of a programming language
named Ether that invoked procedural plans to process goals and assertions concurrently by dynamically creating new rules during program execution. Ether also addressed issues of conflict and contradiction with multiple sources of knowledge and multiple viewpoints.
, history
and sociology of science. It was originally developed building on work in the philosophy of science by Karl Popper
and Imre Lakatos
. In particular, it initially made use of Lakatos' work on proofs and refutations. Subsequently development has been influenced by the work of Geof Bowker, Michel Callon
, Paul Feyerabend
, Elihu M. Gerson, Bruno Latour
, John Law
, Karl Popper
, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm Strauss
, and Lucy Suchman
.
In particular Latour's Science in Action
had great influence. In the book, Janus
figures make paradoxical statements about scientific development. An important challenge for the Scientific Community Metaphor is to reconcile these paradoxical statements.
Quoting from Carl Hewitt, Scientific Community Metaphor systems have characteristics of monotonicity, concurrency, commutativity, pluralism, skepticism and provenance.
The above characteristics are limited in real scientific communities. Publications are sometimes lost or difficult to retrieve. Concurrency is limited by resources including personnel and funding. Sometimes it is easier to rederive a result than to look it up. Scientists only have so much time and energy to read and try to understand the literature. Scientific fads sometimes sweep up almost everyone in a field. The order in which information is received can influence how it is processed. Sponsors can try to control scientific activities. In Ether the semantics of the kinds of activity described in this paragraph are governed by the Actor model
.
Scientific research includes generating theories and processes for modifying, supporting, and opposing these theories. Karl Popper
called the process "conjectures and refutations", which although expressing a core insight, has been shown to be too restrictive a characterization by the work of Michel Callon
, Paul Feyerabend
, Elihu M. Gerson, Mark Johnson
, Thomas Kuhn, George Lakoff
, Imre Lakatos
, Bruno Latour
, John Law
, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm Strauss
, Lucy Suchman
, Ludwig Wittgenstein
, etc.. Three basic kinds of participation in Ether are proposing, supporting, and opposing. Scientific communities are structured to support competition as well as cooperation.
These activities affect the adherence to approaches, theories, methods, etc. in scientific communities. Current adherence does not imply adherence for all future time. Later developments will modify and extend current understandings. Adherence is a local rather than a global phenomenon. No one speaks for the scientific community as a whole.
Opposing ideas may coexist in communities for centuries. On rare occasions a community reaches a breakthrough that clearly decides an issue previously muddled.
. In such cases Ether used translation instead of inheritance. Bruno Latour
has analyzed translation in scientific communities in the context of actor network theory. Imre Lakatos
studied very sophisticated kinds of translations of mathematical (e.g., the Euler formula for polyhedra) and scientific theories.
Viewpoints were used to implement natural deduction (Fitch [1952]) in Ether. In order to prove a goal of the form (P implies Q) in a viewpoint V, it is sufficient to create a new viewpoint V' that inherits from V, assert P in V', and then prove Q in V'. An idea like this was originally introduced into programming language proving by Rulifson, Derksen, and Waldinger [1973] except since Ether is concurrent rather than being sequential it does not rely on being in a single viewpoint that can be sequentially pushed and popped to move to other viewpoints.
Ultimately resolving issues among these viewpoints are matters for negotiation
.
was one of the first to attempt to more precisely characterize individual intelligence through the notion of his famous Turing Test
. This paradigm was developed and deepened in the field of Artificial Intelligence
. Allen Newell
and Herbert Simon
did pioneer work in analyzing the protocols of individual human problem solving behavior on puzzles. More recently Marvin Minsky
has developed the idea that the mind of an individual human is composed of a society of agents in Society of Mind
(see the analysis by Push Singh).
The above research on individual human problem solving is complementary to the Scientific Community Metaphor.
and software technology for the Internet
are being applied in light of the Scientific Community Metaphor.
Legal concerns (e.g., HIPAA
, Sarbanes-Oxley , "The Books and Records Rules" in SEC Rule 17a-3/4 and "Design Criteria Standard for Electronic Records Management Software Applications" in DOD 5015.2 in the U.S.
) are leading organizations to store information monotonically forever. It has just now become less costly in many cases to store information on magnetic disk
than on tape. With increasing storage capacity, sites can monotonically record what they read from the Internet as well as monotonically recording their own operations.
Search engines currently provide rudimentary access to all this information. Future systems will provide interactive question answering broadly conceived
that will make all this information much more useful.
Massive concurrency
(i.e., Web service
s and multi-core
computer architectures) lies in the future posing enormous challenges and opportunities for the Scientific Community Metaphor. In particular, the Scientific Community Metaphor is being used in client cloud computing
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
, the Scientific Community Metaphor is a metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
used to aid understanding scientific communities
Scientific community
The scientific community consists of the total body of scientists, its relationships and interactions. It is normally divided into "sub-communities" each working on a particular field within science. Objectivity is expected to be achieved by the scientific method...
. The first publications on the Scientific Community Metaphor in 1981 and 1982 involved the development of a programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
named Ether that invoked procedural plans to process goals and assertions concurrently by dynamically creating new rules during program execution. Ether also addressed issues of conflict and contradiction with multiple sources of knowledge and multiple viewpoints.
Development
The Scientific Community Metaphor builds on the philosophyPhilosophy of science
The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...
, history
History of science
The history of science is the study of the historical development of human understandings of the natural world and the domains of the social sciences....
and sociology of science. It was originally developed building on work in the philosophy of science by Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
and Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his...
. In particular, it initially made use of Lakatos' work on proofs and refutations. Subsequently development has been influenced by the work of Geof Bowker, Michel Callon
Michel Callon
Michel Callon is a Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Mines de Paris and member of the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation. He is an influential author in the field of Science and Technology Studies and one of the leading proponents of Actor-network theory with Bruno Latour.In recent years ,...
, Paul Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades . He lived a peripatetic life, living at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand,...
, Elihu M. Gerson, Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies...
, John Law
John Law (sociologist)
John Law is a sociologist currently on the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University and key proponent of Actor-network theory. Actor-network theory, sometimes abbreviated to ANT, is a social science approach for describing and explaining social, organisational, scientific and technological...
, Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm Strauss
Anselm Strauss
Anselm Leonard Strauss was an American sociologist internationally known as a medical sociologist and as the developer of grounded theory, an innovative method of qualitative analysis widely used in sociology, nursing, education, social work, and...
, and Lucy Suchman
Lucy Suchman
Lucy Suchman is a full Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom...
.
In particular Latour's Science in Action
Science in Action
Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society is an influential book by Bruno Latour. The English edition was published in 1987 by Harvard University Press. It is written in a text-book style, and contains a full featured approach to the empirical study of science and...
had great influence. In the book, Janus
Janus (mythology)
In ancient Roman religion and mythology, Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions, thence also of gates, doors, doorways, endings and time. He is usually a two-faced god since he looks to the future and the past...
figures make paradoxical statements about scientific development. An important challenge for the Scientific Community Metaphor is to reconcile these paradoxical statements.
Qualities of scientific research
Scientific research depends critically on monotonicity, concurrency, commutativity, and pluralism to propose, modify, support, and oppose scientific methods, practices, and theories.Quoting from Carl Hewitt, Scientific Community Metaphor systems have characteristics of monotonicity, concurrency, commutativity, pluralism, skepticism and provenance.
- monotonicity: Once something is published it cannot be undone. Scientists publish their results so they are available to all. Published work is collected and indexed in libraries. Scientists who change their mind can publish later articles contradicting earlier ones.
- concurrency: Scientists can work concurrently, overlapping in time and interacting with each other.
- commutativity: Publications can be read regardless of whether they initiate new research or become relevant to ongoing research. Scientists who become interested in a scientific question typically make an effort to find out if the answer has already been published. In addition they attempt to keep abreast of further developments as they continue their work.
- pluralism: Publications include heterogeneous, overlapping and possibly conflicting information. There is no central arbiter of truth in scientific communities.
- skepticism: Great effort is expended to test and validate current information and replace it with better information.
- provenance: The provenance of information is carefully tracked and recorded.
The above characteristics are limited in real scientific communities. Publications are sometimes lost or difficult to retrieve. Concurrency is limited by resources including personnel and funding. Sometimes it is easier to rederive a result than to look it up. Scientists only have so much time and energy to read and try to understand the literature. Scientific fads sometimes sweep up almost everyone in a field. The order in which information is received can influence how it is processed. Sponsors can try to control scientific activities. In Ether the semantics of the kinds of activity described in this paragraph are governed by the Actor model
Actor model
In computer science, the Actor model is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats "actors" as the universal primitives of concurrent digital computation: in response to a message that it receives, an actor can make local decisions, create more actors, send more messages, and...
.
Scientific research includes generating theories and processes for modifying, supporting, and opposing these theories. Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
called the process "conjectures and refutations", which although expressing a core insight, has been shown to be too restrictive a characterization by the work of Michel Callon
Michel Callon
Michel Callon is a Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Mines de Paris and member of the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation. He is an influential author in the field of Science and Technology Studies and one of the leading proponents of Actor-network theory with Bruno Latour.In recent years ,...
, Paul Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades . He lived a peripatetic life, living at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand,...
, Elihu M. Gerson, Mark Johnson
Mark Johnson (professor)
Mark L. Johnson is Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is well-known for contributions to embodied philosophy, cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, some of which he has coauthored with George Lakoff such as...
, Thomas Kuhn, George Lakoff
George Lakoff
George P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972...
, Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his...
, Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies...
, John Law
John Law (sociologist)
John Law is a sociologist currently on the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University and key proponent of Actor-network theory. Actor-network theory, sometimes abbreviated to ANT, is a social science approach for describing and explaining social, organisational, scientific and technological...
, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm Strauss
Anselm Strauss
Anselm Leonard Strauss was an American sociologist internationally known as a medical sociologist and as the developer of grounded theory, an innovative method of qualitative analysis widely used in sociology, nursing, education, social work, and...
, Lucy Suchman
Lucy Suchman
Lucy Suchman is a full Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom...
, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
, etc.. Three basic kinds of participation in Ether are proposing, supporting, and opposing. Scientific communities are structured to support competition as well as cooperation.
These activities affect the adherence to approaches, theories, methods, etc. in scientific communities. Current adherence does not imply adherence for all future time. Later developments will modify and extend current understandings. Adherence is a local rather than a global phenomenon. No one speaks for the scientific community as a whole.
Opposing ideas may coexist in communities for centuries. On rare occasions a community reaches a breakthrough that clearly decides an issue previously muddled.
Ether
Ether used viewpoints to relativist information in publications. However a great deal of information is shared across viewpoints. So Ether made use of inheritance so that information in a viewpoint could be readily used in other viewpoints. Sometimes this inheritance is not exact as when the laws of physics in Newtonian mechanics are derived from those of Special RelativitySpecial relativity
Special relativity is the physical theory of measurement in an inertial frame of reference proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies".It generalizes Galileo's...
. In such cases Ether used translation instead of inheritance. Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies...
has analyzed translation in scientific communities in the context of actor network theory. Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his...
studied very sophisticated kinds of translations of mathematical (e.g., the Euler formula for polyhedra) and scientific theories.
Viewpoints were used to implement natural deduction (Fitch [1952]) in Ether. In order to prove a goal of the form (P implies Q) in a viewpoint V, it is sufficient to create a new viewpoint V' that inherits from V, assert P in V', and then prove Q in V'. An idea like this was originally introduced into programming language proving by Rulifson, Derksen, and Waldinger [1973] except since Ether is concurrent rather than being sequential it does not rely on being in a single viewpoint that can be sequentially pushed and popped to move to other viewpoints.
Ultimately resolving issues among these viewpoints are matters for negotiation
Negotiation
Negotiation is a dialogue between two or more people or parties, intended to reach an understanding, resolve point of difference, or gain advantage in outcome of dialogue, to produce an agreement upon courses of action, to bargain for individual or collective advantage, to craft outcomes to satisfy...
.
Emphasis on communities rather than individuals
Alan TuringAlan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...
was one of the first to attempt to more precisely characterize individual intelligence through the notion of his famous Turing Test
Turing test
The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour. In Turing's original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All...
. This paradigm was developed and deepened in the field of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
. Allen Newell
Allen Newell
Allen Newell was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology...
and Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist, and professor—most notably at Carnegie Mellon University—whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics,...
did pioneer work in analyzing the protocols of individual human problem solving behavior on puzzles. More recently Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.-Biography:...
has developed the idea that the mind of an individual human is composed of a society of agents in Society of Mind
Society of Mind
The Society of Mind is both the title of a book and the name of a theory of natural intelligence as written and developed by Marvin Minsky.-Minsky's model:...
(see the analysis by Push Singh).
The above research on individual human problem solving is complementary to the Scientific Community Metaphor.
Current applications
Some developments in hardwareHardware
Hardware is a general term for equipment such as keys, locks, hinges, latches, handles, wire, chains, plumbing supplies, tools, utensils, cutlery and machine parts. Household hardware is typically sold in hardware stores....
and software technology for the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
are being applied in light of the Scientific Community Metaphor.
Legal concerns (e.g., HIPAA
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 was enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996. It was originally sponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy and Sen. Nancy Kassebaum . Title I of HIPAA protects health insurance coverage for workers and their...
, Sarbanes-Oxley , "The Books and Records Rules" in SEC Rule 17a-3/4 and "Design Criteria Standard for Electronic Records Management Software Applications" in DOD 5015.2 in the U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
) are leading organizations to store information monotonically forever. It has just now become less costly in many cases to store information on magnetic disk
Disk storage
Disk storage or disc storage is a general category of storage mechanisms, in which data are digitally recorded by various electronic, magnetic, optical, or mechanical methods on a surface layer deposited of one or more planar, round and rotating disks...
than on tape. With increasing storage capacity, sites can monotonically record what they read from the Internet as well as monotonically recording their own operations.
Search engines currently provide rudimentary access to all this information. Future systems will provide interactive question answering broadly conceived
Question answering
In information retrieval and natural language processing , question answering is the task of automatically answering a question posed in natural language...
that will make all this information much more useful.
Massive concurrency
Concurrent computing
Concurrent computing is a form of computing in which programs are designed as collections of interacting computational processes that may be executed in parallel...
(i.e., Web service
Web service
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...
s and multi-core
Multi-core (computing)
A multi-core processor is a single computing component with two or more independent actual processors , which are the units that read and execute program instructions...
computer architectures) lies in the future posing enormous challenges and opportunities for the Scientific Community Metaphor. In particular, the Scientific Community Metaphor is being used in client cloud computing
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....
See also
- Actor modelActor modelIn computer science, the Actor model is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats "actors" as the universal primitives of concurrent digital computation: in response to a message that it receives, an actor can make local decisions, create more actors, send more messages, and...
- Paraconsistent logics
- The Structure of Scientific RevolutionsThe Structure of Scientific RevolutionsThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions , by Thomas Kuhn, is an analysis of the history of science. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge and it triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in — and beyond — those scholarly...
- Philosophy of SciencePhilosophy of scienceThe philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...
- Science StudiesScience studiesScience studies is an interdisciplinary research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in a broad social, historical, and philosophical context. It is concerned with the history of academic disciplines, the interrelationships between science and society, and the alleged covert purposes...
- PlannerPlanner programming languagePlanner is a programming language designed by Carl Hewitt at MIT, and first published in 1969. First, subsets such as Micro-Planner and Pico-Planner were implemented, and then essentially the whole language was implemented in Popler...