Knowledge Domains

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Knowledge Domains Communities of Practice

• Science TechnologySocial Sciences

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• Science objectively establishes truth, but does
  not control the context in which the scientific
  discovery will assist in the creation of
  knowledge

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the nature of knowledge
realist
social
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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Realist nature of knowledge world is completely
  objective (pure realism)
• Social nature of knowledge there is no
  foundation to knowledge apart from the perception
  of humans (purely socially determined)

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• If scientific truth is objective, it is also
  blind
• Prejudice against social and behavioral research
  on the grounds that it is soft or concerned
  with trivial questions

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Possible use or misuse of research findings
• Critics argue that scientific data may be used to
  justify social stratification and prejudice, or
  that certain groups will appear to be genetically
  inferior
• Behavioral research - human subjects used in
  studies of heredity and human behavior, genetics,
  race and IQ, psychobiology, or sociobiology

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• S/R Standards of evidence are not hopelessly
  culture-bound, though judgements of justification
  are always perspectival knowledge is
  truth-indicative but not absolute
• Knowledge is built through the perspectives of
  our disciplines

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Individuals beliefs formed based on information
  supplied by others (social nature of knowledge)
• Cognitive effort within communities condition
  upon which communities form consensus
• attribution of authority
• division of opinion

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Knowledge chains form an important part of
  journals content - reflecting social/realist
  nature of knowledge
• Knowledge chains rhetoric epistemology
• Rhetoricpersuasion, argument, discourse
• Epistemology knowledge is produced through human
  action
• Journal content (reliability attribution)

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Reliability
• Source of the chain (speaker)
• Bodies of evidence supporting chains
• Perspectival processes shaped by social forces
  (gender, national origin, social structures of
  scholarship and research - does it embrace
  multiple perspectives on which knowledge claims
  are based)

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Attribution
• realized through citation of published work
  epistemic (idea) or procedural (authors work)
• reporting of observed facts

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Information policy literature (Rowland)
• ISI citation indexes to define document test
  collection
• Assumption authors interact with existing
  knowledge through referencing behavior (use of
  the accumulating body of recorded literature)

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Accumulation of a body of recorded literature
  varies according to subject areas
• How older materials are knitted into the fabric
  of more recent publication through citation
• Science and technology select nucleus of
  specific journals brief span of time covering a
  few current years
• Social sciences humanities greater dispersion
  of publications in different forms, on different
  subjects over a comparatively long span of time
• Ephemeral vs. classical literature

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Price (1970) - Prices index (how references are
  distributed over an archive of material)
• Comte (1798-1857) hard science (physics,
  biochemistry), soft science (social science),
  non-science (humanities)

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Cole (1983)
• fundamental differences bw disciplines lie not in
  citation habits but in the structure of their
  knowledge systems, particularly in relation to
  how empirical knowledge is codified into succinct
  and interdependent theoretical statements
• Cozzens (1985)
• Periods of intellectual focus reception -
  obsolescence

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Bradford (1934)
• Core zones core - scatter
• Nadel (1980)
• catholicity of interests is a function of the
  maturity of a specialty (institutionalization
  level)

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Other observations
• disciplinary conventions personal inclination
  determine the breadth of influences on a
  researcher (information-seeking patterns)
• less highly structured or specialized
  disciplines people read widely outside their own
  current areas of concern (arts and humanities -
  information from a wide variety of sources)
• coauthoring sciences (apparatus for
  experimentation) social sciences (division of
  labor as strategy) humanities (not practiced)

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Science TechnologySocial Sciences

• Other observations
• institutional arrangements supporting
  encouraging research
• degree of institutionalization (professional
  associations, specialist journals)
• debates over establishment of new forms of
  institutional knowledge and established academic
  fields