[Fis] Fwd: Scientific publication: Response

Sat Oct 1 20:16:48 CEST 2016

Dear Mark, 

Thank you for another so beautiful video!

Your focus on constraints is reminiscent of Thomas Gieryn's (1983) "boundary
objects" (cf. Star & Griesemer, 1989). You may find it interesting to make
the connection.

>From my perspective, the constraints are historical -- as different from
evolutionary. One can consider them as the footprints of the development
(retention mechanism). In the early stage, the constraints shield the new
development; but the order of control can be inverted: the genesis is
bottom-up, but control can be top-down in a next phase. For example, first
one needs a university context for generating a new field, but the emerging
paradigm thereafter may begin to shape the departments, the conferences,
etc. The self-organization of the paradigmatic development can be
distinguished from the historical development at the organizational level.
Both are needed and thus one expects a trade-off. 

The historical development of constraints necessarily generates
probabilistic entropy (Shannon-type information) because of the Second Law.
The evolutionary development restructures and can be expected to reduce
uncertainty.

What is evolving? You say it nicely in the first paper: the coordination
among expectations. (at p. 6: "How might scholarly expectations be
coordinated in an uncertain world?") The (hypothesized!) coordination is
also the selection mechanism. With hindsight some expectations have to
changed to fit into the new paradigm; others perhaps discarded as noise or
left behind as variation (outdated?). "A science that hesitates to forget
its founders is lost." (Whitehead, 1916, p. 81): the paradigm forces to
rewrite the history in the name of intellectual integrity and new
opportunities.

By focusing on the constraints, you may miss what is constrained. The system
is socially constructed; but -- unlike social-constructivism -- not the
construction itself, but the constructed is taking the lead. Of course, this
has to be worked out empirically: is organization prevailing or
self-organization? Is uncertainty generated or redundancy?

I hope that this is understandable. If some colleagues feel lost, please,
see also: Leydesdorff, Petersen & Ivanova (in press); Leydesdorff, Johnson &
Ivanova (2014).  

Best,
Loet

References:

Gieryn, T. F. (1983). Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from
Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists.
American Sociological Review, 48(6), 781-795.

Leydesdorff, L., Petersen, A., & Ivanova, I. (in press). The
self-organization of meaning and the reflexive communication of information.
Social Science Information (arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.05251). 

Leydesdorff, L., Johnson, M., & Ivanova, I. A. (2014). The Communication of
Expectations and Individual Understanding: Redundancy as Reduction of
Uncertainty, and the Processing of Meaning. Kybernetes, 43(9/10), 1362-1371.

Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology,Translations,
and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of
Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387-420.

Whitehead, A. N. (1916). Address to the British Association at Newcastle.
Nature, 98(14 September 1916), 80-81. doi: 10.1038/098033a0

Loet Leydesdorff 
Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
loet at leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 
Associate Faculty, SPRU, University of Sussex; 
Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
Beijing;
Visiting Professor, Birkbeck, University of London; 
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

-----Original Message-----
From: Fis [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Mark Johnson
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2016 1:46 PM
To: fis; Pedro C. Marijuan
Subject: [Fis] Fwd: Scientific publication: Response

Dear FIS Colleagues,

Thank you very much for your comments. I've made a video response which can
be found here: https://youtu.be/r8T2ssGAius

The video mostly concerns Loet's comment about selection and codification
and references Sergej's point about "shared objects" (and its relation to
activity theory). Shared objects are extremely important, but Francisco is
right - Loet's point about codification goes the heart of the matter.

In responding to Loet (and to some extent Sergej) I draw attention to the
nature of teaching and its distinction with communication. This means
standing back from Luhmann's binary model of communication, which he saw as
a contingency-reduction process in the selection of meaning. Instead I
suggest looking at communication as a process of the revealing and
coordination of constraints. In Loet's work, I think this is probably the
same as redundancy... Both Ashby and Von Foerster are powerful reference
points for a deeper understanding - notably Von Foerster's paper "On self
organising systems and their environments"
(see http://e1020.pbworks.com/f/fulltext.pdf) and Ashby's late work on
"constraint analysis" which was somewhat obscured in the hype around
second-order cybernetics. Ashby's notebooks are the best place to
start: http://www.rossashby.info/journal/index/index.html#constraint - he
later called this "cylindrance".

I agree with Moises about new ways of thinking about accrediting
intellectual contributions. Uber is very interesting .... but it remains
centralized (with a company making huge profits in California). What if it
was peer-to-peer, or the record of contributions was 'ownerless'. There is a
lot of work going on at the moment with regard to 'decentralise the web'
(see http://www.wired.co.uk/article/tim-berners-lee-reclaim-the-web). I
think this provides an valuable indicator of where we might look for richer
mechanisms of ascribing credit for intellectual work. I'm not sure about
Berners-Lee's Linked Data, but maybe http://ipfs.io has potential. I think
these technologies present the best chance of transforming our
market-oriented logic - so, Joseph, there is hope!

As for the history, I'm no historian unfortunately... but we could do with
some proper historical analysis of scientific communication, status and
power over the centuries. The parallels between the 16/17 centuries and our
own time are compelling. I predict that our universities will one day be
transformed in their approach to education to as great an extent that the
Cambridge curriculum which Bacon so harshly criticised in 1605 (The
advancement of Learning -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Advancement_of_Learning) was transformed
by 1700.

I work for a medical faculty in Liverpool, and today I am at the Royal
College of Physicians in London, which was founded in 1518 (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_College_of_Physicians) They have an
extraordinary archive here, which raises more questions about how scientists
before the Royal Society communicated with one another. We ought to get a
better grip of the historical shift that occurred in the 1660s so that we
have a better understanding of what kind of shift to expect in the years to
come. As a side comment, I recommend looking at T.S. Eliot's analysis of the
transformation that occurred in poetry in the same period - what he called a
"dissociation of sensibility".

Best wishes and many thanks for your comments,

Mark

--
Dr. Mark William Johnson
Institute of Learning and Teaching
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
University of Liverpool

Phone: 07786 064505
Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
Blog: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com

--
Dr. Mark William Johnson
Institute of Learning and Teaching
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
University of Liverpool

Visiting Professor
Far Eastern Federal University, Russia

Phone: 07786 064505
Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
Blog: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com
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