Abstract
Abstract
Whereas knowledge has often been attributed to individuals or, from a sociological perspective, to communities, a communications perspective on the sciences enables us to proceed to the measurement of the discursive knowledge contents. Knowledge claims are organized into texts which are entrained in evolving structures. The aggregated citation relations among journals, for example, can be used to visualize disciplinary structures. The structures are reproduced as “ecosystems” which differ among them in terms of using specific codes in the communications (e.g., jargons). Unlike biological DNA, these codes are not hard-wired; they can be changed in the communication. The sciences develop historically along trajectories embedded in regimes of expectations. Regimes exert selection pressure on the historical manifestations. The evolutionary dynamics at the regime level induce crises, bifurcations, etc., as historical events.
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
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