Societies of minds: Science as distributed computing

Abstract

Science is studied in very different ways by historians, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists. Not only do researchers from different fields apply markedly different methods, they also tend to focus on apparently disparate aspects of science. At the farthest extremes, we find on one side some philosophers attempting logical analyses of scientific knowledge, and on the other some sociologists maintaining that all knowledge is socially constructed. This paper is an attempt to view history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology of science from a unified perspective. Researchers in different fields have explicitly or implicitly operated with several models of the relations between different approaches to the study of science. For reasons described below, I am primarily concerned with the relation between the psychology and the sociology of science. Reductionist models contend either that sociology can be reduced to the more explanatorily fundamental field of psychology, or that psychology can be reduced to sociology. Slightly less extreme are residue models, according to which psychology or philosophy or sociology takes priority, with the other fields explaining what is left over. Less imperialistically, still other models see the different fields of science studies as cooperating or competing to explain aspects of the nature of science in relative autonomy from other fields. I shall sketch an alternative view that rejects reduction, residue, and autonomy models of science studies. After reviewing these models and their proponents, I outline a new model that views scientific communities from the perspective of distributed artificial intelligence (DAI). DAI is a relatively new branch of the field of artificial intelligence that concerns how problems can be solved by networks of intelligent computers that communicate with each other. Although I assume the cognitivist view that individual scientists are information processors, I shall argue that the view of a scientific community as a network of information processors is not reductionist and does not eliminate or subordinate the role of sociologists or social historians in understanding science. I shall also show that a DAI approach provides a helpful perspective on the interesting social question of the cognitive division of labor.