"Science" column
Science of science, that is, the science of science, is the self-reflection of science, which is a discipline that takes the entire scientific and technological knowledge and its activities as the research object, explores the basic laws of scientific and technological development, and applies them to science and technology management and science and technology policy research. Although Bernal believes that there is no need for a strict definition of "scientology", because science itself is constantly changing, the research object of scientology mainly covers three aspects, namely, the system of scientific and technological knowledge, scientific and technological activities, and the carrier of scientific and technological knowledge and activities. The scientific and technological knowledge system refers to the objective knowledge world formed by human beings through cognitive and practical activities, and scientific and technological activities refer to the activities of scientific discovery, technological invention and innovative application, and the carriers of scientific and technological knowledge and activities include scientific communication media, industry-university-research organizations and scientific communities. Understanding the origins and development of scientific activity can help us understand this strategic field of study.
Sprouts of scientific activity:
Science in Poland
Science was born in Poland in the first half of the 20th century, and the period from 1910s to 1939 was the period when science began to germinate. Poland gained independence in 1918 after 123 years of exile. At this time, the revolution in modern physics, represented by quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, was in full swing, sweeping the entire European continent and the world, which had a profound impact on Poland in the reconstruction of the country. How modern science plays a role in the reconstruction of the country has become a major issue that has been placed in front of the scientific interface in Poland, which has led to the emergence of scientific activities in Poland.
The terminology, concepts, and early research of science were pioneered by the Poles. Scientology, first of all, was supported by Polish academic organizations and the government, and was active in the interaction between the Mianowski Foundation in Warsaw and the Warsaw School in Lviv. In 1918, the Polish government established the world's first independent institution for the development of science and humanities, headed by the famous scholar S. Michalski. Subsequently, a series of scientific research institutions and organizations of academic activities emerged.
The Minowsky Foundation was crucial to the development of science and scientology before the outbreak of World War II. In 1919, the foundation not only founded the world's first professional academic journal in the field of science, Polish Science: Needs, Organization and Development, but also established its own library and documentation center, and organized academic research conferences and forums with other universities at home and abroad. In particular, the journal Polish Science: Needs, Organization and Development, headed by Mikhalski, has been committed to a holistic approach to science since its inception and was one of the first to recognize the need to establish a specialized field for the study of scientific issues.
In 1923, the journal proposed to conduct a content analysis of articles published in previous years, trying to explore the conditions for scientific creation and scientific development, and noted that "the study of science in a scientific way is emerging." Subsequently, the journal published a series of research papers on "Treating Science as a Social Phenomenon", emphasizing the relationship between the motivation of social practice and the needs of scientific development, explaining the necessity of systematic support for scientific research and the relationship between scientific culture and society, and advocating a new reflection on scientific research and the conditions for its development. These studies form a relatively unique area of research.
During this period, under the interdisciplinary banner of "science", the Polish academic community was full of talents and elites, and a number of outstanding figures emerged. Standing on the commanding heights of the modern scientific revolution in the early 20 th century, they explored science from different perspectives, led the world's research on scientific culture, the essence and laws of science, promoted the rational thinking of human beings on scientific activities and their development, and opened the prelude to world science.
Among them, F. Znanetsky, a sociologist who went to the United States after the First World War. When Znaniecki returned to his native Poland in 1920, he was keenly aware of the need for a holistic study of the rapidly developing sciences, and proposed that the theory of knowledge should move from the metaphysics of knowledge to the empirical sciences, and that it should begin to structure a special humanities discipline, that is, science. In 1923, he published a long essay entitled "The Subjects and Tasks of the Science of Knowledge" and realized that the tasks and research methods of the new discipline of "Scientology" must be different from those disciplines that have been studying science for a long time, but require a holistic and unique perspective. Later, he included epistemology, logic, and the history of science, and added some interesting research in psychology and the sociology of knowledge.
In 1927, the Polish philosopher T. Kotarbiński (T. Kotarbiński) in the article "Elements of Epistemology, Formal Logic and Scientific Methodology" was the first to create the concept of "science" in the sense we currently use, that is, Science of science, he believed that the analysis of science from the philosophical to logical, methodological and epistemological levels has its limitations, and science should also be used to study science, so the concept of "science" is adopted. In 1935, Kotabinski's pupils Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski collaborated on the first paper entitled "Scientology."
The Aus' pioneering work in science was fully affirmed and highly praised by Bernard and Price. In 1965, at the 11th International Conference on the History of Science, held in Warsaw, Bernard gave a report entitled "On the Road to Science", arguing that the term "Science of science" was coined by the Auschites in 1935. Two years later, in a lecture in Poland entitled "Training and Research in the History of Science to Support Management and Decision-Making", Price also repeatedly emphasized that the subject of science we study today was defined by the Auschites more than 30 years ago.
So, what exactly is "science" in the O's writing?
They argue that there are two perspectives on the study of "science", namely the "epistemological perspective" and the "anthropological perspective". The scope of the study of science is defined in two research paradigms, which regard science as an epistemic phenomenon and science as a phenomenon of human culture; the research themes of science are clarified: what science is, how science is produced, and what is the impact of science; the disciplinary independence of "science" is defended, and the research program of science is formulated. Mr. and Mrs. Au's division of the study of science into five parts, namely "Philosophy of Science", "Psychology of Science", "Sociology of Science", "Organization and Management of Science", and "History of Science and Technology".
The O's further pointed out that in less than three centuries science has formed a scientific culture that is very different from the previous cultures, that it is so dynamic and influential, that its development rate and quantitative and qualitative changes are unprecedented, and that this new discipline will take over the tasks of the earlier single discipline (philosophy) and carry out multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research from general methodology, sociology, psychology, cultural history, etc.
The Birth of Science:
Bernard's systematic analysis of science
The vigorous activity of Polish science was interrupted by the re-occupation of Poland by Germany in 1939, while the study of the history of scientific thought, which focused more on scientific self-consciousness, arose in Russia at the same time. The participation of the Soviet delegation led by Bukharin in London in 1931 at the Second International Congress on the History of Science and Technology was an important event in the history of science, especially the collection of essays "Science at the Crossroads" and Hessen's oral report "The Socio-Economic Roots of Newtonian Mechanics", which had a strong intellectual impact on the rising British left-wing scientists. However, with the political purges of the Soviet Union in 1937, scientific research in Eastern European countries also came to an end.
The study of science in the Soviet Union aroused the interest of the British scientific community, and many British scholars began to pay attention to the development of science in the Soviet Union, and published a large number of related books, and the study of science as a social phenomenon emerged in Britain. Crowther's Industry and Education in the Soviet Union (1932), Soviet Science (1930) and The Social Connections of Science (1941), Biologist Huxley's A Scientist in the Soviet Union (1932), Scientific Research and Social Needs (1932), Hogburn's Science for Citizens (1938), Haldane's Marxist Philosophy and Science (1938), Lévy's Modern Science (1939), etc., all have a positive understanding of science, He has conducted extensive research on the issues of technological, economic, and social development, and has consciously taken Marxist philosophy as the theoretical basis for the "social study of science."
Bernard, who is engaged in crystallography and biochemistry research, is a representative of this trend. He argues that British scientists' interest in dialectical materialism really began at the International Congress on the History of Science in London in 1931, and that Gersen's paper enabled Western scientists to "discover for the first time the theoretical basis of Marx's dialectical materialism, which had existed in Western Europe for half a century but was not appreciated." As a strategic scientist, Bernard was deeply aware of the strategic position and great role of science in society, and as early as 1938, he published an article entitled "The Social Function of Science" in The Modern Quarterly, and in 1939, in order to fully demonstrate it, he published his masterpiece "The Social Function of Science".
The book's views are not only personal to Bernard, but also to a larger school of science, the Scientological Community. Most of its members adhere to Marx's maxim: "Philosophers simply interpret the world in different ways, and the problem is to change the world." Gary Werskey believes that compared with the "invisible college" with no fixed classrooms, no campuses, and no walls, this group of left-wing scientists in the 30s of the 20th century was of the same age, taught and researched at Cambridge University, and made outstanding contributions in their respective professional fields, and at the same time paid attention to social issues, believed that science was a powerful force for social progress, and politically sympathized with the British Communist Party or the left wing of the Labour Party, forming a "tangible college" that could be seen and touched 。
Bernard's The Social Function of Science marked the beginning of the foundation of world science. This book collects a wide range of quantitative indicators and empirical data, supports the basic idea of "enhancing the social function of scientific research through the systematic organization of scientific research", emphasizes the reflexivity of science from the two aspects of "the role that science plays now" and "the role that science can play", and pioneers the scientific analysis of the scientific social system.
Science maturing:
The rise of scientometrics
The rise of scientific ecometrics is an important sign of the maturity of science.
British historian of science and technology Price is recognized as the "father of scientometrics" for his pioneering contributions in the field of scientometrics, but the term "scientometrics" was put forward by the Soviet mathematician Nalimov in 1969 in the book "Scientometrics: A Study of the Development of Science as an Information Process", which is the world's first monograph on the use of mathematical methods to study the development process of science, and is the theoretical basis for the study of scientific systems by Soviet and Eastern European scholars. However, the name of the discipline "scientometrics" pioneered by Nalimov did not immediately attract the attention of the international academic community due to language communication restrictions, and it was not until 1971 that the U.S. military translated it as Scientometrics. It was also in this year that Nalimov and Price met for the first time at the International Congress on the History of Science in Moscow.
Price had a question that had been bothered for years and could not be satisfactorily answered. Since the mid-17th century, Western science has embarked on a path of exponential growth, so that each generation of scientists has been caught in the dilemma of explosive growth in scientific knowledge and deepening trends in specialization. The question that arises is: how does new knowledge grow out of old knowledge? How to characterize the overall pattern of scientific development?
Although terms such as research frontier and research topic are commonly used, these terms are not precisely explained. Only a handful of scholars of his time have attempted to answer this question, such as Bernard's network model of the overall picture of scientific development, Merton's reference as an important aspect of the norm of scientific "communism", and Kuhn's idea of exploring the traces of scientific revolutions through references. However, due to the lack of the necessary analytical tools, these efforts have unfortunately stopped there.
The solution to this question is largely due to the creation of the Science Citation Index database in 1963 by Eugene Garfield, Ph.D., who graduated from Columbia University in 1951 with a degree in chemistry, thus moving from statistical mathematical analysis of the history of science to a network analysis of scientific citations. In 1965, on this basis, Price published his famous article "The Network of Scientific Papers", using Garfield's SCI as the data source, in an attempt to outline the overall characteristics of the world's scientific paper network, and realized his 1964 article "The Science of Science" about the "land" and "country" of scientific knowledge. If we trace the origin of today's scientific knowledge map, this paper must be of foundational significance.
Development of Science:
Moving forward in differentiation and integration
In fact, the real popularity of the term scientometrics can be attributed to the Hungarian scientist Brauwin, who founded in 1978 a truly meaningful international academic journal, Scientometrics, which is named after the term scientometrics invented by Nalimov. This journal has made scientometrics widely disseminated and recognized. However, in the same year as the founding of the international journal, another collection of essays, "Towards Scientoitrics: The Emergence of Scientific Indicators", was also published, which was written by leading scientists from different disciplines and reflected on some of the new ideas of the time.
Sociologists believe that scientific bibliometric analysis, which focuses on the macro level, has a limited role in explaining scientific practice. As a result, sociology of science turned more to micro-analysis in the 1980s, focusing on the behavior of scientists in the laboratory, and scientology began to differentiate between sociology of science and scientometrics. This can be seen in the establishment of the Bernard Prize in 1981 and the Pryce Prize in 1984 and the research interests of their laureates. The first Bernard Prize was awarded to Price, the "father of scientometrics", and the second Bernard Prize was awarded to Merton, one of the important founders of "Sociology of Science". Since then, with the establishment of the Price Prize, the scitometric indicators focusing on science communication have become closer to library and information science, and have become more and more distant from the study of the sociology of science.
Network analysis is driving scientometrics towards scientific insights and predictions, and the 2003 Mapping Knowledge Domain symposium in the United States is one of the landmark events. Under the impetus of these different research forces, scientific research with scientific and technological activities as the research object has gradually diverged, forming "sociology of scientific knowledge" with qualitative research and "scientometrics and scientific indicators" with quantitative research as the main focus.
With the increasing emphasis on quantitative evidence-based research on policy by science and technology policymakers in the United States, computational social science has emerged. Computational social science is based on the availability of large-scale behavioral data, social network data, demographic data, or other digital resource archives, and through the application of computing technology and big data analysis technology, to improve the understanding of complex social phenomena that are difficult to understand by traditional social science methods. Computational sociology promotes the integration of the original research paradigms of scientometrics and sociology of science. Professor Li Zhengfeng of Tsinghua University captured the great significance of computational sociology to scientific research in the early years. In a 2022 article, he wrote:
The study of science with scientific methods, as the ideal of science, has always been the internal driving force to promote the development of science, and has promoted the transformation of science from quantitative science to computational science. The biggest difference between ecometrics and computational science is that the former is limited to data types and computing power, and most scholars mainly analyze data with the help of scientific indicators, existing software and algorithms provided by databases, which is a relatively closed research, while the latter is based on comprehensive overall data to actively design algorithms to realize the analysis of the relationship between variables and the inference of causality, which is an active and open research paradigm. In this sense, computational science is closer to the ideal of the science at its inception than econometrics...... However, computational science is algorithm-driven and capable of analyzing massive amounts of data, but it cannot completely solve the problem of a holistic understanding of science. ”
Therefore, science is still on the road and has a long way to go......
Editor's note: At the beginning of the 20th century, with the rapid development of science and technology and the rise of sociology of science, science gradually received attention and research. After a century of development, science is becoming an important interdisciplinary discipline, which has had a profound impact on the development of science and technology and social progress. In the face of the acceleration of major changes unseen in a century, especially when countries around the world are focusing on science and technology, hoping to find a way out of the changes through scientific and technological innovation, science has become more necessary.
For this reason, the journal "World Science" has set up a column "Exploration of Science". On the one hand, it is necessary to encourage more people to join the research and discussion of science, and to deeply explore the nature and laws of science, the formation and development of knowledge, and the influence and application of science in society, economy, culture, etc., so as to solve social, economic and environmental problems more effectively. On the other hand, Scientology provides an understanding of the interaction between scientific units at different spatial and temporal scales, allowing us to understand the conditions behind "creativity", the factors that drive scientific research, and the process of scientific discovery, so as to develop a series of policies and tools that can accelerate scientific research and provide support for major scientific decisions, which is also an important mission of the journal's sponsor, the Shanghai Institute of Science.
-The author of this article, Chen Yue, is the director, professor and doctoral supervisor of the Institute of Science and Technology Management of Dalian University of Technology, the executive director of the Chinese Society of Science and Technology Policy, and the director of the Special Committee for Science Theory and Discipline Construction.
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