Logology (science of science)

In sociology, the term logology, is used in two ways.

It is a synonym used by some authors for the equivalent earlier term "science of science" and for the semi-equivalent earlier term "sociology of science". Here "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 unequivocally, the "study of science". The word "logology" provides convenient grammatical variants not available with the earlier terms, "science of science" and "sociology of science": i.e., "logologist", "to logologize", "logological", "logologically".

This meaning of "logology" is distinct from "the study of words", as the term was introduced by Kenneth Burke in The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (1961), which sought to find a universal theory and methodology of language. Burke introduced the book: "If we defined 'theology' as 'words about God', then by 'logology' we should mean 'words about words'". Burke's "logology" (in this theological sense) has been cited as a useful tool of sociology.

Origins

The early 20th century brought calls, initially from sociologists, for the creation of a new, empirically based science that would study science 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 44th president of the American Sociological Association, opened a seminal 1923 article:

A dozen years later, two Polish sociologists of a slightly younger generation, Stanisław Ossowski and Maria Ossowska (the Ossowscy, husband and wife) took up the same subject in a more compact and better known 1935 article on "The Science of Science". They wrote:

The Ossowscy — the 1935 English-language version of whose article first introduced the term "science of science" to the world — postulated that the new discipline would subsume such earlier disciplines as epistemology, the philosophy of science, the "psychology of science", and the "sociology of science".

It would also concern itself with

The Ossowscy acknowledged the existence of an approximate German-language equivalent to the expression "science of science": "Wissenschaftslehre". But they explained that, leaving aside Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), who had called his whole philosophical speculation by that name, the term had been used in Germany chiefly to denote logic with general methodology, or logic with general methodology and questions usually included in epistemology. "Wissenschaftslehre" had also been used in almost the same sense by Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) — as logic, understood in a very wide sense, later made familiar at the turn of the 20th century.

The Ossowscy also referenced the 20th-century German philosopher Werner Schingnitz (1899–1953) who, in fragmentary 1931 remarks, had enumerated some possible types of research in the science of science and had proposed a name for it: "scientiology". The two Polish sociologists commented: "Those who wish to replace the expression 'science of science' by a one-word term [that] sound[s] international, in the belief that only after receiving such a name [will] a given group of [questions be] officially dubbed an autonomous discipline, [might] be reminded of the name mathesiology, proposed long ago for similar purposes [by the French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836)]."

Yet, before long, in Poland, the unwieldy three-word term "nauka o nauce" ("science of science") was replaced by the more versatile one-word term "naukoznawstwo" ("logology") and its natural variants: "naukoznawca" ("logologist"), "naukoznawczy" ("logological"), and "naukoznawczo" ("logologically"). And just after World War II, only 11 years after the Ossowscy's landmark 1935 paper, the year 1946 saw the founding of the Polish Academy of Sciences' quarterly Zagadnienia Naukoznawstwa (Logology) — long before similar journals in many other countries.

The new discipline also took root elsewhere — in English-speaking countries, without the benefit of a one-word name.

Findings

Science

According to the theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson,

"The inventor of a brilliant idea," writes Dyson, "cannot tell whether it is right or wrong." Dyson cites a psychologist, David Kahneman, as describing how theories are born: "We can't live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true." "Great scientists," writes Dyson, "produce right theories and wrong theories, and believe in them with equal conviction." The passionate pursuit of wrong theories is a normal part of the development of science.

Dyson cites, after Mario Livio, five famous scientists who held erroneous scientific theories: Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein. Each made major contributions to the understanding of nature, and each believed firmly in a theory that proved wrong.

Darwin explained the evolution of life with his theory of natural selection of inherited variations, but he believed in a theory of blending inheritance that made the propagation of new variations impossible. He never read Gregor Mendel's studies that showed that the laws of inheritance would become simple when inheritance was considered as a random process. Though Darwin in 1866 did the same experiment that Mendel had, Darwin did not get comparable results because he failed to appreciate the statistical importance of using very large experimental samples. Eventually, Mendelian inheritance by random variation would, no thanks to Darwin, provide the raw material for Darwinian selection to work on.

Lord Kelvin discovered basic laws of energy and heat, then used these laws to calculate an estimate of the age of the earth that was too short by a factor of fifty. He based his calculation on the belief that the earth's mantle was solid and could transfer heat from the interior to the surface only by conduction. It is now known that the mantle is partly fluid and transfers most of the heat by the far more efficient process of convection, which carries heat by a massive circulation of hot rock moving upward and cooler rock moving downward. Kelvin could see the eruptions of volcanoes bringing hot liquid from deep underground to the surface; but his skill in calculation blinded him to processes such as volcanic eruptions that could not be calculated.

Linus Pauling discovered the chemical structure of protein and proposed a completely wrong structure for DNA, which carries hereditary information from parent to offspring. Pauling guessed a wrong structure for DNA because he assumed that a pattern that worked for protein would also work for DNA. He overlooked the gross chemical differences between protein and DNA. Francis Crick and James Watson paid attention to the differences and found the correct structure for DNA that Pauling had missed a year earlier.

Fred Hoyle discovered the process by which the heavier elements essential to life, including carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and iron, are created by nuclear reactions in the cores of massive stars. He then proposed a theory of the history of the universe known as steady-state cosmology, which has the universe existing forever without a Big Bang (as Hoyle derisively dubbed it) at the beginning. He held his belief in the steady state long after observations proved that the Big Bang had happened.

Albert Einstein discovered the theory of space, time and gravitation known as General Relativity, and then added an additonal component later known as dark energy. Later, Einstein withdrew his proposal of dark energy, believing it unnecessary. Long after his death, observations proved that dark energy really exists, so that Einstein's addition to the theory was right and his withdrawl was wrong.

To Mario Livio's five examples of scientists who blundered, Dyson adds a sixth: himself. Dyson had concluded, on theoretical principles, that what was to become known as the W-particle, a charged weak boson, could not exist. An experiment conducted at CERN, in Geneva, later proved him wrong. "With hindsight I could see several reasons why my stability argument would not apply to W-particles. [They] are too massive and too short-lived to be a constituent of anything that resembles ordinary matter."

Multiple discovery

Historians and sociologists have remarked on the occurrence, in science, of "multiple independent discovery". The American sociologist Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other. "Sometimes the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make a new discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else has made years before."

Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others, described by A. Rupert Hall; the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Many more examples of multiple discovery have been identified.

Merton contrasted a "multiple" with a "singleton" — a discovery that has been made uniquely by a single scientist or group of scientists working together. He believed that it is multiple discoveries, rather than unique ones, that represent the common pattern in science.

Multiple discoveries in the history of science provide evidence for evolutionary models of science and technology, such as memetics (the study of self-replicating units of culture), evolutionary epistemology (which applies the concepts of biological evolution to study of the growth of human knowledge), and cultural selection theory (which studies sociological and cultural evolution in a Darwinian manner).

A recombinant-DNA-inspired "paradigm of paradigms" has been posited, that describes a mechanism of "recombinant conceptualization." This paradigm predicates that a new concept arises through the crossing of pre-existing concepts and facts. This is what is meant when one says that a scientist or artist has been "influenced by" another — etymologically, that a concept of the latter's has "flowed into" the mind of the former. Of course, not every new concept so formed will be viable: adapting social Darwinist Herbert Spencer's phrase, only the fittest concepts survive.

Multiple independent discovery and invention, like discovery and invention generally, have been fostered by the evolution of means of communication: roads, vehicles, sailing vessels, writing, printing, institutions of education, telegraphy, and mass media, including the internet. Gutenberg's invention of printing (which itself involved a number of discrete inventions) substantially facilitated the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times. All these developments have catalyzed and accelerated the process of recombinant conceptualization, and thus also of multiple independent discovery.

See also

• List of multiple discoveries
• Multiple discovery
• Science and technology studies
• Science of science policy
• Science studies
• Science, technology and society
• Sociology of science

Bibliography

• Freeman Dyson, "The Case for Blunders" (review of Mario Livio, Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein—Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists that Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe, Simon and Schuster), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXI, no. 4 (March 6, 2014), pp. 4–8.
• Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science, edited and with an introduction by Piotr Sztompka, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Chicago, University of Chicago Press,1973.
• Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski, "The Science of Science", reprinted in Bohdan Walentynowicz, ed., Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, pp. 82–95.
• Klemens Szaniawski, "Preface", Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, pp. VII–X.
• Bohdan Walentynowicz, ed., Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, Dordrecht, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1982, ISBN 83-01-03607-9.
• Bohdan Walentynowicz, "Editor's Note", Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, pp. XI–XII.
• Florian Znaniecki, "The Subject Matter and Tasks of the Science of Knowledge" (English translation), in Bohdan Walentynowicz, ed., Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, pp. 1–81.