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Interdisciplinary Science Reviews: Constructing scientific community

Leeds, UK, 10 July 2006

The June 2006 issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews is a collection of papers that look at scientific community. For further information on Interdisplinary Science Reviews, or to subscribe, click here.

What is scientific community? Is there such a thing as the scientific community? To what extent is the idea of (a/the) scientific community a social, philosophical, even ideological construction? Is it possible to construct such a community in a more concrete sense, to design, plan, build physical infrastructure our of which scientific community will naturally grow, in which the ideals of science as a communal endeavour will take root and thrive? Who belongs to the community of science? Who, by accident or design, is excluded? Some of these questions are more easily answered than others. All of them, and more, are addressed in the pages that follow. One further question: Why is it that we think so readily of modern-day science being practised in a community? The culprit, or course, is Thomas Kuhn. He was not, as Struan Jacobs describes, the furst to use the term - that honour goes most probably to Josiah Royce - but it was through Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that it gained wide currency.

When Structure was published, in 1962, Kuh had already left the formative environment of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, one of the knowledge communities examined by W. C. Lubenow, for the department of philosophy at Berkeley, across San Francisco Bay from Silicon Valley. Margarent Pugh O'Mara's paper offers a salutary reminder that the success of 'the Valley' has been due to a set of highly specific historical, political and local conditions, tied up with the Cold War, Stanford's founding land grant, and some very canny university administration. The complexity and particularity of these conditions aside, however, unexpected similarities emerge between the Californian Cold War experience and the history of the secret science towns of Soviet Siberia of the same era, the subject of Alexander D'Hooghe's contribution. In both cases the new communities offered freedom, from on the one hand the stifling hand of Moscow, on the other the more tradition-bound East Coast institutions, both somewhat paradoxically also being the result of meticulous and (though at different levels) centralised planning. In both cases too, architectural and landscape form was used to disguise industrial function. Another example of the intentional construction of a knowledge community is explored by Marilyn Strathern, although in this case the construction is not physical but organisational, the Cambridge Genetics Knowledge Park being a reconfiguration of existing bodies and communities of expertise.

One final means by which a strong sense of a given community can be constructed in trhough its introductory texts. Rounding out this consideration of possible meanings of scientific community, Susan M. Hodgson points to some of the ways in which undergraduate textbooks send out signals about acceptable forms of participation and belonging in the community of science. Much of this territory goes still largely unexamined, saying little, as Hodgson remarks, for the seriousness of the commitment of the scientific community to addressing issues of diversity and exclusion within its ranks.

Howard Cattermole (howard.cattermole@dunelm.org.uk)

Articles in this issue:

• Knowledge communities in Europe from the Renaissance through the Cold War, W.C. Lubenow
• Cold War politics and scientific communities: the case of Silicon Valley, Margaret Pugh O'Mara
• Science towns as fragments of a new civilisation: the Soviet development of Siberia, Alexander D'Hooghe
• Knowledge on its travels: dispersal and divergence in the makeup of communities, Marilyn Strathern
• Models of scientific community: Charles Sanders Peirce to Thomas Kuhn, Struan Jacobs
• Narrating community, history and absence in scientific texts, Susan M. Hodgson

For further information, please contact:

Kirsten Woolley at Maney Publishing