In computer science, the scientific community metaphor is a metaphor used to aid understanding

scientific communities The scientific community is a diverse network of interacting scientists. It includes many " sub-communities" working on particular scientific fields, and within particular institutions; interdisciplinary and cross-institutional activities are als ...

. 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.

Development

The scientific community metaphor builds on the

philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

, history and sociology of science. It was originally developed building on work in the philosophy of science by

Karl Popper Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the cl ...

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,

, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm Strauss, and Lucy Suchman. In particular Latour's '' Science in Action'' had great influence. In the book,

Janus In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus ( ; la, Ianvs ) is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces. The month of January is named for Janu ...

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 The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats ''actor'' as the universal primitive of concurrent computation. In response to a message it receives, an actor can: make local decisions, create more ...

. Scientific research includes generating theories and processes for modifying, supporting, and opposing these theories.

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 George Philip Lakoff (; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguistics, cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain comple ...

, 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.

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 Newton's laws of motion are three basic laws of classical mechanics that describe the relationship between the motion of an object and the forces acting on it. These laws can be paraphrased as follows: # A body remains at rest, or in motion ...

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 Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in ma ...

formula for polyhedra) and scientific theories. Viewpoints were used to implement natural deduction (Fitch 952 in Ether. In order to prove a goal of the form in a viewpoint , it is sufficient to create a new viewpoint that inherits from , assert in , and then prove in . An idea like this was originally introduced into programming language proving by Rulifson, Derksen, and Waldinger 973except 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 (as studied in the sociology and philosophy of science by Geof Bowker, Michel Callon, Paul Feyerabend, Elihu M. Gerson, Bruno Latour, John Law,

, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm 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 Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) 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 ...

and Herbert A. 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.

Current applications

Some developments in hardware and software technology for the Internet are being applied in light of the scientific community metaphor. Legal concerns (''e.g.'',

HIPAA The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA or the Kennedy– Kassebaum Act) is a United States Act of Congress enacted by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on August 21, 19 ...

, 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 Concurrent means happening at the same time. Concurrency, concurrent, or concurrence may refer to: Law * Concurrence, in jurisprudence, the need to prove both ''actus reus'' and ''mens rea'' * Concurring opinion (also called a "concurrence"), a ...

(''i.e.,'' Web services and

multi-core A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such a ...

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.A historical perspective on developing foundations for privacy-friendly client cloud computing: the paradigm shift from “inconsistency denial” to “semantic integration”
ArXiv January 30, 2009.

Development

Qualities of scientific research

Ether

Emphasis on communities rather than individuals

Current applications

See also

References

Further reading