Sociology of Science

16 Aug 2008 09:57

---

Raymond Aron says somewhere that "science is inseparable from the republic of scholars." This is substantially true, though I can imagine odd exceptions. (R. Crusoe, FRS, could have done astronomy or botany or algebra before meeting Friday, though I don't think he could have invented them.) In any event, science is an activity which groups do vastly better, and easier, than isolated individuals. In saying this, I trust I shan't have to defend myself against suspicion of social-constructionist heresy. The practical recognition of this truth goes back to the founders of the first academies during the scientific revolution, and it was explicitly recognized in the Enlightenment, for instance in d'Alembert's "Preliminary Discourse" to the Encyclopedie. An investigation into science which doesn't recognize, and account for, its social nature is on all fours with one which doesn't recognize, and account for, the fact that it produces reliable knowledge, which is to say much like an investigation of agriculture which doesn't realize it produces food. These should be "every schoolchild knows" truths, though sadly they're anything but.

Every schoolchild also knows that differences in social organization don't completely explain why statistical mechanics is fruitful, but UFOlogy is not — that matter really is made out of molecules, and people really aren't abducted by aliens, has, to say the least, something to do with it. But the sciences started from beliefs about as wacko as anything today's kooks can produce — say, alchemy — but haven't stayed there, whereas the kooks have, and this deserves explanation. More: a proper understanding of this could help improve scientific method, something eagerly to be desired.

Of course there are already lots of people engaged in this undertaking; sociology of science is, in general, more sensible than most scientists suppose. (Also more sensible than most of the rest of sociology, but that's another story for another time.) Even the noise in the management literature recently about "learning organizations" and the like is not unrelated, and might even be promising. (On the one hand, lots of problems get cracked once people see that lots of money could be made from the solution. On the other hand, we are talking about the management witch-doctors.) There are, however, two potentially fruitful lines of research which nobody, so far as I know, has bothered to undertake. One is straightforward comparative sociology, contrasting genuine intellectual disciplines (including, besides the natural sciences, things like history or philology) with the half-disciplines, the pseudosciences, and the simple crackpots. The other is to take some of the descriptions of how scientists act and interact with each other from the existing sociological literature, throw them on the computer, and see if they produce something which looks like the science we know; also if they produce the results their authors claim they do. (My suspicion is that most of them will not.)

See also: Collective Cognition; Evolutionary Epistemology; History of Science; Science; Scientific Method

Recommended:
• Arthur Donovan, Larry Laudan and Rachel Laudan (eds.), Scrutinizing Science: Empirical Studies of Scientific Change
• Ronald N. Giere, Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach
• Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions [Formal, and at least semi-plausible if abstract, modeling of just how messy, "sullied" social groups, e.g. real scientific disciplines, can achieve genuine cognitive progress — can even be more progressive than less sullied ones. Not so well-written as Toulmin, but probably closer to his ideas than either of them would like to admit.]
• Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems
• Robert K. Merton, Sociology of Science
• Mark Newman [Many fine papers on co-authorship networks, produced more rapidly than I feel like updating this notebook]
• Nienke Oomes, "Market Failures in the Economy of Science" [Chapter in Nienke's dissertation, hopefully appearing soon as a paper]
• Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science
• Mark Risjord, "Scientific Change as Political Action: Franz Boas and the Anthropology of Race", Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37 (2007): 24--45 [This is an interesting case-study of how some intellectual work can be at once properly scientific and carry ethical and political implications. However, I think that Risjord is actually not very astutte about the philosophy here. (I realize it takes some gall for me to say this.) On the one hand, what made Boas's work compelling was that it appealed to purely cognitive considerations, and did so validly. The motives which may or may not have impelled Boas to undertake this work were simply irrelevant. For that matter, it does not compel anyone to take up any position on the ethical worth of human beings. Someone who had, as a fundamental part of their system of values, a belief that the races have an intrinsic order of merit could, with perfect consistency, accept all of Boas's arguments. I think any such person would be crazy, but sputtering incredulity is not a logical argument.]
• Camille Roth and Paul Bourgine [Commented on elsewhere]
  • "Binding Social and Cultural Networks: A Model", nlin.AO/0309035
  • "Epistemic communities: description and hierarchic categorization", nlin.AO/0409013
• Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding, vol. 1: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts [I think he's wrong about some of the strictly philosophical implications of his approach, and about formalization, but this is the best all-around consideration of how science — and other proper intellectual disciplines, for that matter — functions as a collective, social enterprise that I've ever seen; and this was published in 1972. Volume 2, incidentally, was supposed to address individual judgment, but I don't think it was ever written]
• Susan Trawek, Beam-times and Life-Times [Ethnographic study of the "natives" at high-energy accelerator labs. Remarkably for any ethnography, the natives don't, by and large, think the depiction demeaning or bone-headed.]
• John Ziman, Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means [An extremely sound synthesis by a good theoretical physicist turned eminent science-studier]

Recommended, if somewhat tangential:
• Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition [What to avoid]
• Richard F. Hamilton, The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community [How scholars in the humanities and social sciences manage to repeat and elaborate on sheer myths for generations; more of a social-psychology approach than a strictly sociological one.]
• Noretta Koertege (ed.), A House Built on Sand: Flaws in the Cultural Studies Account of Science [See especially Kitcher's apologia for well-done sociological studies of science]
• Cass R. Sunstein, "Academic Fads and Fashions (with Special Reference to Law)" [More social psychology of scholarship. Online]

To read:
• Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, H. Jeong, Zoltan Neda, Erzsebet Ravasz, A. Schubert and Tamas Vicsek, "Evolution of the social network of scientific collaborations," cond-mat/0104162
• M. J. Barber, A. Krueger, T. Krueger, T. Roediger-Schluga, "The Network of European Research and Development Projects", physics/0509119
• Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars [blurb]
• Stephen R. Barley and Julian Orr (eds.), Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in the United States
• Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison (eds.), Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science
• Geoffrey C. Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences [Blurb]
• James Robert Brown, Who Rules in Science: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars
• Carlos Cotta and Juan J. Merelo, "The Complex Network of Evolutionary Computation Authors: an Initial Study", physics/0507196
• Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities
• H.-D. Daniel, Guardians of Science: Fairness and Reliability of Peer Review
• Bruce Edmonds, "Artificial science — a simulation test-bed for studying the social processes of science", cogprints/4263
• Henry Etzkowitz, Carol Kemelgor and Brian Uzzi, Athena Bound: The Advancement of Women in Science and Technology
• James A. Evans, "Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship", Science 321 (2008): 395--399
• Ying Fan, Menghui Li, Jiawei Chen, Liang Gao, Zengru Di and Jinshan Wu, "Network of Econophysicists: a weighted network to investigate the development of Econophysics", cond-mat/0401054
• Trevor Fenner, Mark Levene and George Loizou, "A Model for Collaboration Networks Giving Rise to a Power Law Distribution with an Exponential Cutoff", physics/0503184
• N. Gilbert, A Simulation of the Structure of Academic Science
• C. Lee Giles and Isaac G. Councill, "Who gets acknowledged: Measuring scientific contributions through automatic acknowledgment indexing", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 101 (2004): 17599--17604
• T.L. Goedeke and S. Rikoon, "Otters as Actors: Scientific Controversy, Dynamism of Networks, and the Implications of Power in Ecological Restoration", Social Studies of Science 38 (2008): 111--132
• Michel L. Goldstein, Steven A. Morris and Gary G. Yen, "Group-based Yule model for bipartite author-paper networks", Physical Review E 71 (2005): 026108
• Victor V. Kryssanov, Evgeny L. Kuleshov, Frank J. Rinaldo, and Hitoshi Ogawa, "We cite as we communicate: A communication model for the citation process", cs.DL/0703115
• Timothy Lenoir, Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines
• Menghui Li, Jinshan Wu, Dahui Wang, Tao Zhou, Zengru Di and Ying Fan, "Evolving Model of Weighted Networks Inspired by Scientific Collaboration Networks", cond-mat/0501655 [Only "qualtitively consistent behavior with the empirical results" is claimed; I should read it to see if that's because they haven't checked quantatitively, or if it fails when it comes to actual numbers.]
• P. D. Magnus, "Distributed Cognition and the Task of Science", Social Studies of Science 37 (2007): 297-310
• Matti Peltomaki and Mikko Alava, "Correlations in Bipartite Collaboration Networks", physics/0508027
• Michael Polanyi, "The republic of science: its political and economic theory", Minerva 1 (1962): 54--73
• Anne E. Preston, Leaving Science: Occupational Exit from Scientific Careers
• José J. Ramasco, S. N. Dorogovtsev and Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, "Self-organization of collaboration networks", Physical Review E 70 (036106) [It's not clear to me from the abstract just what they mean by "self-organization", but of course it piques my interest]
• Jose J. Ramasco and Steven A. Morris, "Social inertia in collaboration networks", physics/0509247
• Jerome R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems
• Camille Roth
  • "Measuring Generalized Preferential Attachment in Dynamic Social Networks", nlin.AO/0507021
  • "Co-evolution in Epistemic Networks: Reconstructing Social Complex Systems", Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences 1 (2006): 3:2
• James D. Savage, Funding Science in America: Congress, Universities, and the Politics of the Academic Pork Barrel
• Mikhail V. Simkin and V. P. Roychowdhury
  • "Read before you cite!" cond-mat/0212043 [I can't resist quoting the whole abstract. "We report a method of estimating what percentage of people who cited a paper had actually read it. The method is based on a stochastic modeling of the citation process that explains empirical studies of misprint distributions in citations (which we show follows a Zipf law). Our estimate is only about 20% of citers read the original."]
  • "Copied citations create renowned papers?" cond-mat/0305150 ["Recently we discovered (cond-mat/0212043) that the majority of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in other papers. Here we show that a model, in which a scientist picks three random papers, cites them,and also copies a quarter of their references accounts quantitatively for empirically observed citation distribution. Simple mathematical probability, not genius, can explain why some papers are cited a lot more than the other."]
  • "A mathematical theory of citing", physics/0504094 ["Here we propose a modified model: when a scientist writes a manuscript, he picks up several random recent papers, cites them and also copies some of their references. The difference with the original model is the word recent. We solve the model using methods of the theory of branching processes, and find that it can explain [certain] features of citation distribution, which our original model couldn't account for. The model can also explain 'sleeping beauties in science', i.e., papers that are little cited for a decade or so, and later 'awake' and get a lot of citations. Although much can be understood from purely random models, we find that to obtain a good quantitative agreement with empirical citation data one must introduce Darwinian fitness parameter for the papers."]
• Miriam Solomon, Social Empiricism
• Kent W. Staley, Evidence for the Top Quark: Objectivity and Bias in Collaborative Experimentation
• Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King, Communication Patterns of Engineers
• Gordon Tullock, The Organization of Inquiry
• Alexei Vazquez, "Statistics of citation networks," cond-mat/0105031
• Walter G. Vincentin, What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History.
• Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice [Related but not identical subject]
• K. Brad Wray, "The Epistemic Significance of Collaborative Research", Philosophy of Science 69 (2002): 150--168
• John H. Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour
• Jesús P. Zamora Bonilla, "Scientific Inference and the Pursuit of Fame: A Contractarian Approach", Philosophy of Science 69 (2002): 300--323
• John Ziman
  • An Introduction to Science Studies: The Philosophical and Social Aspects of Science and Technology [Blurb]
  • Of One Mind: The Collectivization of Science
  • Prometheus Bound: Science in a Dynamic Steady State [Blurb]
  • Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science
  • Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science