Scientific Community Metaphor

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.

The scientific community metaphor builds on the philosophy, 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.

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.

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