---
title: "Scientific community metaphor"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_community_metaphor"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:37:22.603136+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== 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 A. 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.

== Current applications ==
Some developments in hardware and software technology for the Internet are being applied in light of the scientific community metaphor.Hewitt 2006
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 U.S.) are leading organizations to store information monotonically forever.  It has just now become less costly in many cases to store information on magnetic disk 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 interactive question answering broadly conceived that will make all this information much more useful.
Massive concurrency (i.e., Web services and multi-core computer architectures) lies in the future posing enormous challenges and opportunities for the scientific community metaphor. In particular, the scientific community metaphor is being used in client cloud computing.

== See also ==
Paraconsistent logics
Planner
Science studies
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

== References ==

== Further reading ==
Julian Davies. "Popler 1.5 Reference Manual" University of Edinburgh, TPU  Report No. 1, May 1973.
Frederic Fitch. Symbolic Logic: an Introduction. Ronald Press, New York, 1952.
Ramanathan Guha. Contexts: A Formalization and Some Applications PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1991.
Pat Hayes. "Computation and Deduction" Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science: Proceedings of Symposium and Summer School, Štrbské Pleso, High Tatras, Czechoslovakia, September 3–8, 1973.
Carl Hewitt. "PLANNER: A Language for Proving Theorems in Robots" IJCAI 1969
Carl Hewitt. "Procedural Embedding of Knowledge In Planner" IJCAI 1971.
Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop and Richard Steiger. "A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence"  IJCAI 1973.
Carl Hewitt. Large-scale Organizational Computing requires Unstratified Reflection and Strong Paraconsistency in "Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems III" edited by Jaime Sichman, Pablo Noriega, Julian Padget and Sascha Ossowski.  Springer. 2008.
Carl Hewitt. Development of Logic Programming: What went wrong, What was done about it, and What it might mean for the future What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons from AI Research and Applications; papers from the 2008 AAAI Workshop. Technical Report WS-08-14. AAAI Press. July 2008.
William Kornfeld and Carl Hewitt. "The Scientific Community Metaphor" IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, SMC-11. 1981
Bill Kornfeld. "The Use of Parallelism to Implement a Heuristic Search" IJCAI 1981.
Bill Kornfeld.  Parallelism in Problem Solving MIT EECS Doctoral Dissertation. August 1981.
Bill Kornfeld. "Combinatorially Implosive Algorithms" CACM.  1982.
Robert Kowalski "Predicate Logic as Programming Language" Memo 70, Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University.  1973
Imre Lakatos. "Proofs and Refutations" Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1976.
Bruno Latour. Science In Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., USA, 1987.
John McCarthy.  "Generality in Artificial Intelligence" CACM.  December 1987.
Jeff Rulifson, Jan Derksen, and Richard Waldinger. "QA4, A Procedural Calculus for Intuitive Reasoning" SRI AI Center Technical Note 73, November 1973.
Earl Sacerdoti, et al., "QLISP A Language for the Interactive Development of Complex Systems"  AFIPS. 1976
Push Singh "Examining the Society of Mind" To appear in Computing and Informatics