Logology (sociology)

Logology ("the science of science") is the study of all aspects of science and of its practitioners—aspects philosophical, biological, psychological, societal, historical, political, institutional, financial.

The term "logology" is used here as a synonym for the equivalent term "science of science" and the semi-equivalent term "sociology of science".

The term "logology" is back-formed from "-logy" (as in "geology", "anthropology", "sociology", etc.) in the sense of the "study of study" or the "science of science"—or, more plainly, the "study of science".

The word "logology" provides grammatical variants not available with the earlier terms "science of science" and "sociology of science"—"logologist", "to logologize", "logological", "logologically".

The early 20th century brought calls, initially from sociologists, for the creation of a new, empirically based science that would study the scientific enterprise itself. The early proposals were put forward with some hesitancy and deferentiality. The new meta-science would be given a variety of names, including "science of knowledge", "science of science", "sociology of science", and "logology".

The Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki, considered the founder of Polish academic sociology and who also served as the 44th president of the American Sociological Association, opened a 1923 article:

Although theoretical reflection on knowledge — which arose as early as Heraclitus and the Eleatics — stretches in an unbroken line through the history of human thought to the present day, nevertheless the most recent times have introduced into these reflections so many new questions and viewpoints so divergent from the earlier ones that we may safely say that we are now witnessing the creation of a new science of knowledge [author's emphasis] whose relationship to the old inquiries may be compared with the relationship of modern physics and chemistry to the 'natural philosophy' that preceded them, or of contemporary sociology to the 'political philosophy' of antiquity and the Renaissance. To be sure, we are still dealing with an accumulation of miscellaneous observations rather than with a systematically and consciously developed scientific whole, but gradually an order is emerging from this chaos and there is beginning to take shape a concept of a single, general theory of knowledge as a separate branch of human culture, endowed with special empirical properties and permitting of empirical study. This theory is beginning to take its place beside such sciences as economics and linguistics as it assumes the traits of a positive, comparative, generalizing and elucidating science. Thereby, too, it is coming to be distinguished clearly from epistemology, from normative logic and from a strictly descriptive history of knowledge. The distinction ... is not the result of some arbitrary a priori designation of the boundaries between the respective fields of human thought, but has developed spontaneously through the emergence — within each of the earlier types of reflection upon knowledge — of problems that have resisted accommodation within its traditional sphere. These problems, gradually concentrating on a common ground outside the scope of purely epistemological, logical or historical thought, constitute one of the main sources of the new science of knowledge.

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