Scientific Community Metaphor
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The Scientific Community Metaphor was published in 1981 by Bill Kornfeld and Carl Hewitt as an approach to extending pattern directed invocation programming languages (cf. Planner) that invoke high level procedural plans on the basis of messages, e.g., assertions and goals. Their work built on the philosophy, history and sociology of science with its analysis that scientific research depends critically on monotonicity, parallelism, commutativity, and pluralism to propose, modify, support, and oppose scientific methods, practices, and theories.
A programming language named Ether was developed that invokes procedural plans to process goals and assertions in parallel by dynamically creating new rules during program execution. Ether also addressed issues of conflict and contradiction with multiple sources of knowledge and multiple viewpoints.
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Monotonicity, Parallelism, Commutatvity, and Pluralism
Ether systems have characteristics of monotonicity, parallelism, commutativity, and pluralism.
- monotonicity: Once something is published it cannot be withdrawn. 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. However, they are not allowed to go into the libraries and "erase" old publications.
- parallelism: Many scientists can work at the same time.
- 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.
Of course the above characteristics are limited in real scientific communities. Publications are sometimes lost or difficult to retrieve. Parallelism 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.
Proposing, Modifying, Supporting, and Opposing
Scientific research includes generating theories and processes for modifying, supporting, and opposing these theories. Karl Popper called the process "conjectures and refutations", which has been proven to be too restrictive a characterization by the work of Michel Callon, Paul Feyerabend, Elihu M. Gerson, Mark Johnson (professor), Thomas Kuhn, George Lakoff, Imre Lakatos, Bruno Latour, John Law, Susan Leigh Star, Anslem 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 dies 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.
Viewpoints, Inheritance, Translation, and Negotiation
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 Relativity. 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.
Ultimately these are matters for negotiation as studied in the sociology and philosophy of science by Michel Callon, Paul Feyerabend, Elihu M. Gerson, Bruno Latour, John Law, Karl Popper, Susan Leigh Star, Anslem Strauss, Lucy Suchman, etc.
Emphasis on communities rather than individuals
Alan Turing 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 perceptive analysis by Push Singh).
The above research on individual human problem solving is complementary to the Scientific Community Metaphor.
See also
Reference
- William Kornfeld and Carl Hewitt. The Scientific Community Metaphor MIT AI Memo 641. January 1981.
- Push Singh Examining the Society of Mind To appear in Computing and Informatics, from: http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/ExaminingSOM.html
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