Scientific community
The scientific community consists of the entire body of scientists together with their relationships and interactions. It is usually divided into "subcommunities", each working in a particular field of science (for example, there is a robotics community within the field of computer science). Members of the same community do not need to work together. Communication between members is established by the dissemination of research papers and hypotheses through articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, or by attending conferences where new research is presented or ideas are exchanged and debated.
Constitution
Members of the same community do not need to work together. Therefore, communication between members is established by the dissemination of research papers and hypotheses through articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, or by attending conferences where new research is presented and ideas are exchanged and debated. There are also many informal methods of communicating scientific papers, as well as results (see scientific dissemination), although the true validity and importance of each one will depend on each subcommunity.
Incorporation into associations present within each sub-community is generally a function of education, employment status, and institutional affiliation.
Historically and currently, scientists have used a variety of methods to determine who belongs and who does not belong to the scientific community, which is generally required to determine which fields of research can be marked as "science". Fields of knowledge that appear to be scientific, but are judged to be outside the norms of the scientific community, are marked as "pseudoscience".
The scientific consensus
The consensus of the scientific community is governed by the scientific method. The scientific method implicitly requires the existence of the scientific community, where the processes of peer review and reproducibility are carried out.
It is the scientific community that recognizes and supports the current scientific consensus within a field: the "Reigning Scientific Paradigm", which will remain in force and resist change until real substantive evidence is presented and repeated that has sufficient argument to be able to demand and demonstrate a paradigm shift or new approach or complement; according to the theory of scientific change carried out by Thomas Kuhn.
According to Kuhn, new subcommunities are established around new paradigms by developing their own terminology, historical sense, and sense of problems to solve (and those to ignore).
Sometimes, those who postulate or are in favor of a hypothesis or theory with minority support, are therefore against the "Current scientific paradigm". In addition, they often use the term "Paradigm" as a derogatory term, so that exalting their theory or hypothesis as a change of mentality and ideas, compared to what they define as an "orthodoxy" within the scientific community.
The criterion of truth
Hume's position in relation to Kant laid the foundations for logicist, historicist, and structuralist approaches, among others, within the philosophy of science.
The thought of Karl Popper
Karl Popper proposes to replace the problem of verification with that of falsification. For him a theory is scientific if it can be subjected to a falsifying test, which is refutable even if it has not been falsified.
The thought of Thomas Kuhn
It was from 1961 that the debate began around terms such as paradigm, scientific community, normal science and scientific revolution. In 1969, the term paradigm changed to that of disciplinary matrix, due to a criticism made by the professor Margaret Masterman who considered that Kuhn used the initial term in twenty-one different senses.
The matrix would be composed of four elements: symbolic generalizations, shared commitments to beliefs, shared values by communities, and exemplars.
The thought of Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos proposes to address the problem of the objective evaluation of the development of science in terms of progressive changes and degenerative changes of problems in the series of scientific theories. This continuity develops from a true research program.
Further reading
- Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979).
- Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy physicists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
- Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985).