Scientific Community Metaphor |
The Scientific Community Metaphor was published in 1981 by Bill Kornfeld and Carl Hewitt as an approach to understanding scientific community by extending pattern directed invocation programming languages ( cf. Planner programming language) that invoke high level procedural plans on the basis of messages, e.g. , assertions and goals. Their work built on the philosophy, history and sociology of science with its analysis that scientific research depends critically on monotonicity, concurrency, commutativity, and pluralism to propose, modify, support, and oppose scientific methods, practices, and theories.
A programming language named Ether was developed that invokes 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.
= Monotonicity, Concurrency, Commutatvity, and Pluralism =
Ether systems have characteristics of monotonicity , concurrency , commutativity , and pluralism .
:monotonicity: Once something is published it cannot be withdrawn. 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. However, they are not allowed to go into the libraries and erase old publications.
: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.
Of course 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.
= Proposing, Modifying, Supporting, and Opposing=
Scientific research includes generating theories and processes for modifying, supporting, and opposing these theories. Karl Popper 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 (professor), Thomas Samuel Kuhn, George Lakoff, Imre Lakatos, Bruno Latour, John Law (sociologist), Susan Leigh Star, Anslem 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.
= Viewpoints, Inheritance, Translation, and Negotiation =
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 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 formula for polyhedra) and scientific theories.
Viewpoints were used to implement natural deduction (Fitch [1952]) in Ether. In order to prove a goal of the form (P implies Q) in a viewpoint V, it is sufficient to create a new viewpoint V that inherits from V, assert P in V , and then prove Q in V . An idea like this was orginally introduced into programming language proving by Rulifson, Derksen, and Waldinger [1973] except 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 Michel Callon, Paul Feyerabend, Elihu M. Gerson, Bruno Latour, John Law (sociologist), Karl Popper, 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 and Herbert 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.
=Prospects for the Scientific Community Metaphor=
Developments in hardware and Software technology for the Internet since the original paper was published are tending to increase the importance of the Scientific Community Metaphor.
Legal concerns ( e.g. , HIPAA, 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 US) are leading organizations to store information monotonically forever. It has just now become less costly in many cases to store information on disk storage 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 question answering that will make all this information much more useful.
Massive concurrent computation ( i.e., Web services and [http://www.intel.com/technology/techresearch/idf/platform-2015-keynote.htm many-core] computer architectures) lies in the future posing enormous challenges and opportunities.
= See also =
= Reference =
*Frederic Fitch. Symbolic Logic: an Introduction. Ronald Press, New York, 1952. *Carl Hewitt. PLANNER: A Language for Proving Theorems in Robots IJCAI 1969 *Gerry Sussman and Terry Winograd. Micro-planner Reference Manual AI Memo No, 203, MIT Project MAC, July 1970. *Terry Winograd. Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language MIT AI TR-235. January 1971. *Carl Hewitt. Procedural Embedding of Knowledge In Planner IJCAI 1971. *Gerry Sussman, Terry Winograd and Eugene Charniak. Micro-Planner Reference Manual (Update) AI Memo 203A, MIT AI Lab, December 1971 *Carl Hewitt. Description and Theoretical Analysis (Using Schemata) of Planner, A Language for Proving Theorems and Manipulating Models in a Robot AI Memo No. 251, MIT Project MAC, April 1972. *Bruce Anderson. Documentation for LIB PICO-PLANNER School of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University. 1972 *Bruce Baumgart. Micro-Planner Alternate Reference Manual Stanford AI Lab Operating Note No. 67, April 1972. *Eugene Charniak. Toward a Model of Children s Story Comprehension MIT AI TR-266. December 1972. *Julian Davies. Popler 1.5 Reference Manual University of Edinburgh, TPU Report No. 1, May 1973. *Jeff Rulifson, Jan Derksen, and Richard Waldinger. QA4, A Procedural Calculus for Intuitive Reasoning SRI AI Center Technical Note 73, November 1973. *Robert Kowalski Predicate Logic as Programming Language Memo 70, Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University. 1973 *Pat Hayes. Computation and Deduction Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science: Proceedings of Symposium and Summer School, trbské Pleso, High Tatras, Czechoslovakia, September 3-8, 1973. *Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop and Richard Steiger. A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence IJCAI 1973. *Drew McDermott and Gerry Sussman. The Conniver Reference Manual MIT AI Memo 259A. January 1974. *[https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5693 William Kornfeld and Carl Hewitt. The Scientific Community Metaphor MIT AI Memo 641. January 1981.] *John McCarthy. Generality in Artificial Intelligence CACM. December 1987. *Ramanathan Guha. Contexts: A Formalization and Some Applications PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1991. *[http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/ExaminingSOM.html Push Singh Examining the Society of Mind] To appear in Computing and Informatics|
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