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+Actor–network theory (ANT) is a theoretical and methodological approach to social theory where everything in the social and natural worlds exists in constantly shifting networks of relationships. It posits that nothing exists outside those relationships. All the factors involved in a social situation are on the same level, and thus there are no external social forces beyond what and how the network participants interact at present. Thus, objects, ideas, processes, and any other relevant factors are seen as just as important in creating social situations as humans.
+ANT holds that social forces do not exist in themselves, and therefore cannot be used to explain social phenomena.  Instead, strictly empirical analysis should be undertaken to "describe" rather than "explain" social activity.  Only after this can one introduce the concept of social forces, and only as an abstract theoretical concept, not something which genuinely exists in the world.
+Although it is best known for its controversial insistence on the capacity of nonhumans to act or participate in systems or networks or both, ANT is also associated with forceful critiques of conventional and critical sociology. Developed by science and technology studies (STS) scholars Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour, the sociologist John Law, and others, it can more technically be described as a "material-semiotic" method. This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and semiotic.
+The theory demonstrates that everything in the social and natural worlds, human and nonhuman, interacts in shifting networks of relationships without any other elements out of the networks. ANT challenges many traditional approaches by defining nonhumans as actors equal to humans. This claim provides a new perspective when applying the theory in practice.
+Broadly speaking, ANT is a constructivist approach in that it avoids essentialist explanations of events or innovations (i.e. ANT explains a successful theory by understanding the combinations and interactions of elements that make it successful, rather than saying it is true and the others are false). Likewise, it is not a cohesive theory in itself. Rather, ANT functions as a strategy that assists people in being sensitive to terms and the often unexplored assumptions underlying them. It is distinguished from many other STS and sociological network theories for its distinct material-semiotic approach.
+
+== Background and context ==
+ANT was first developed at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (CSI) of the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris in the early 1980s by staff (Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich, Bruno Latour) and visitors (including John Law). The 1984 book co-authored by John Law and fellow-sociologist Peter Lodge (Science for Social Scientists; London: Macmillan Press Ltd.) is a good example of early explorations of how the growth and structure of knowledge could be analyzed and interpreted through the interactions of actors and networks.  Initially created in an attempt to understand processes of innovation and knowledge-creation in science and technology, the approach drew on existing work in STS, on studies of large technological systems, and on a range of French intellectual resources including the semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas, the writing of philosopher Michel Serres, and the Annales School of history.
+ANT appears to reflect many of the preoccupations of French post-structuralism, and in particular a concern with non-foundational and multiple material-semiotic relations. At the same time, it was much more firmly embedded in English-language academic traditions than most post-structuralist-influenced approaches. Its grounding in (predominantly English) science and technology studies was reflected in an intense commitment to the development of theory through qualitative empirical case-studies. Its links with largely US-originated work on large technical systems were reflected in its willingness to analyse large scale technological developments in an even-handed manner to include political, organizational, legal, technical and scientific factors.
+Many of the characteristic ANT tools (including the notions of translation, generalized symmetry and the "heterogeneous network"), together with a scientometric tool for mapping innovations in science and technology ("co-word analysis") were initially developed during the 1980s, predominantly in and around the CSI. The "state of the art" of ANT in the late 1980s is well-described in Latour's 1987 text, Science in Action.
+From about 1990 onwards, ANT started to become popular as a tool for analysis in a range of fields beyond STS. It was picked up and developed by authors in parts of organizational analysis, informatics, health studies, geography, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, feminist studies, technical communication, and economics.
+As of 2008, ANT is a widespread, if controversial, range of material-semiotic approaches for the analysis of heterogeneous relations. In part because of its popularity, it is interpreted and used in a wide range of alternative and sometimes incompatible ways. There is no orthodoxy in current ANT, and different authors use the approach in substantially different ways. Some authors talk of "after-ANT" to refer to "successor projects" blending together different problem-focuses with those of ANT.
+
+== Key concepts ==
+
+=== Actor/Actant ===
+An actor (actant) is that which acts and causes action. It implies no motivation of human individual actors nor of humans in general. An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of action. In another word, an actor, in this circumstance, is considered as any entity that does things. For example, in the "Pasteur Network", microorganisms are not inert, they cause unsterilized materials to ferment while leaving behind sterilized materials not affected. If they took other actions, that is, if they did not cooperate with Pasteur – if they did not take action (at least according to Pasteur's intentions) – then Pasteur's story may be a bit different. It is in this sense that Latour can refer to microorganisms as actors.
+Under the framework of ANT, the principle of generalized symmetry requires all entities must be described in the same terms before a network is considered. Any differences between entities are generated in the network of relations, and do not exist before any network is applied.

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+
+==== Human actors ====
+Human normally refers to human beings and their human behaviors.
+
+==== Nonhuman actors ====
+Traditionally, nonhuman entities are creatures including plants, animals, geology, and natural forces, as well as a collective human making of arts, languages. In ANT, nonhuman covers multiple entities including things, objects, animals, natural phenomena, material structures, transportation devices, texts, and economic goods. But nonhuman actors do not cover entities such as humans, supernatural beings, and other symbolic objects in nature.
+
+=== Actor-Network ===
+As the term implies, the actor-network is the central concept in ANT. The term "network" is somewhat problematic in that it, as Latour notes, has a number of unwanted connotations. Firstly, it implies that what is described takes the shape of a network, which is not necessarily the case. Secondly, it implies "transportation without deformation," which, in ANT, is not possible since any actor-network involves a vast number of translations. Latour, however, still contends that network is a fitting term to use, because "it has no a priori order relation; it is not tied to the axiological myth of a top and of a bottom of society; it makes absolutely no assumption whether a specific locus is macro- or micro- and does not modify the tools to study the element 'a' or the element 'b'." This use of the term "network" is very similar to Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomes; Latour even remarks tongue-in-cheek that he would have no objection to renaming ANT "actant-rhizome ontology" if it only had sounded better, which hints at Latour's uneasiness with the word "theory".
+Actor–network theory tries to explain how material–semiotic networks come together to act as a whole; the clusters of actors involved in creating meaning are both material and semiotic. As a part of this it may look at explicit strategies for relating different elements together into a network so that they form an apparently coherent whole. These networks are potentially transient, existing in a constant making and re-making. This means that relations need to be repeatedly "performed" or the network will dissolve. They also assume that networks of relations are not intrinsically coherent, and may indeed contain conflicts. Social relations, in other words, are only ever in process, and must be performed continuously.
+The Pasteur story that was mentioned above introduced the patterned network of diverse materials, which is called the idea of 'heterogenous networks'. The basic idea of patterned network is that human is not the only factor or contributor in the society, or in any social activities and networks. Thus, the network composes machines, animals, things, and any other objects. For those nonhuman actors, it might be hard for people to imagine their roles in the network. For example, say two people, Jacob and Mike, are speaking through texts. Within the current technology, they are able to communicate with each other without seeing each other in person. Therefore, when typing or writing, the communication is basically not mediated by either of them, but instead by a network of objects, like their computers or cell phones.
+If taken to its logical conclusion, then, nearly any actor can be considered merely a sum of other, smaller actors. A car is an example of a complicated system. It contains many electronic and mechanical components, all of which are essentially hidden from view to the driver, who simply deals with the car as a single object. This effect is known as punctualisation, and is similar to the idea of encapsulation in object-oriented programming.
+When an actor network breaks down, the punctualisation effect tends to cease as well. In the automobile example above, a non-working engine would cause the driver to become aware of the car as a collection of parts rather than just a vehicle capable of transporting him or her from place to place. This can also occur when elements of a network act contrarily to the network as a whole. In his book Pandora's Hope, Latour likens depunctualization to the opening of a black box. When closed, the box is perceived simply as a box, although when it is opened all elements inside it become visible.
+
+=== Translation ===
+Central to ANT is the concept of translation which is sometimes referred to as sociology of translation, in which innovators attempt to create a forum, a central network in which all the actors agree that the network is worth building and defending. In his widely debated 1986 study of how marine biologists tried to restock the St Brieuc Bay in order to produce more scallops, Michel Callon defined 4 moments of translation:
+Problematisation: The researchers attempted to make themselves important to the other players in the drama by identifying their nature and issues, then claiming that they could be remedied if the actors negotiated the 'obligatory passage point' of the researchers' study program.
+Interessement: A series of procedures used by the researchers to bind the other actors to the parts that had been assigned to them in that program.
+Enrollment: A collection of tactics used by the researchers to define and connect the numerous roles they had assigned to others.
+Mobilisation: The researchers utilized a series of approaches to ensure that ostensible spokespeople for various key collectivities were appropriately able to represent those collectivities and were not deceived by the latter.
+Also important to the notion is the role of network objects in helping to smooth out the translation process by creating equivalencies between what would otherwise be very challenging people, organizations or conditions to mesh together.  Bruno Latour spoke about this particular task of objects in his work Reassembling the Social.

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+
+=== Quasi-object ===
+For the rethinking of social relations as networks, Latour mobilizes a concept from Michel Serres and expands on it in order “to locate the position of these strange new hybrids”. Quasi-objects are simultaneously quasi-subjects – the prefix quasi denotes that neither ontological status as subject or object is pure or permanent, but that these are dynamic entities whose status shifts, depending on their respective momentous activity and their according position in a collective or network. What is decisive is circulation and participation, from which networks emerge, examples for quasi-objects are language, money, bread, love, or the ball in a soccer game: all of these human or non-human, material or immaterial actants have no agency (and thus, subject-status) in themselves, however, they can be seen as the connective tissue underlying – or even activating – the interactions in which they are enmeshed. In Reassembling the Social, Latour refers to these in-between actants as “the mediators whose proliferation generates, among many other entities, what could be called quasi-objects and quasi-subjects.”
+Actor–network theory refers to these creations as tokens or quasi-objects which are passed between actors within the network. As the token is increasingly transmitted or passed through the network, it becomes increasingly punctualized and also increasingly reified. When the token is decreasingly transmitted, or when an actor fails to transmit the token (e.g., the oil pump breaks), punctualization and reification are decreased as well.
+
+== Other central concepts ==
+
+=== A material semiotic method ===
+Although it is called a "theory", ANT does not usually explain "why" a network takes the form that it does. Rather, ANT is a way of thoroughly exploring the relational ties within a network (which can be a multitude of different things). As Latour notes, "explanation does not follow from description; it is description taken that much further." It is not, in other words, a theory "of" anything, but rather a method, or a "how-to book" as Latour puts it.
+The approach is related to other versions of material-semiotics (notably the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and feminist scholar Donna Haraway). It can also be seen as a way of being faithful to the insights of ethnomethodology and its detailed descriptions of how common activities, habits and procedures sustain themselves.  Similarities between ANT and symbolic interactionist approaches such as the newer forms of grounded theory like situational analysis, exist, although Latour objects to such a comparison.
+Although ANT is mostly associated with studies of science and technology and with the sociology of science, it has been making steady progress in other fields of sociology as well.  ANT is adamantly empirical, and as such yields useful insights and tools for sociological inquiry in general. ANT has been deployed in studies of identity and subjectivity, urban transportation systems, and passion and addiction. It also makes steady progress in political and historical sociology.
+
+=== Intermediaries and mediators ===
+The distinction between intermediaries and mediators is key to ANT sociology. Intermediaries are entities which make no difference (to some interesting state of affairs which we are studying) and so can be ignored. They transport the force of some other entity more or less without transformation and so are fairly uninteresting. Mediators are entities which multiply difference and so should be the object of study. Their outputs cannot be predicted by their inputs. From an ANT point of view sociology has tended to treat too much of the world as intermediaries.
+For instance, a sociologist might take silk and nylon as intermediaries, holding that the former "means", "reflects", or "symbolises" the upper classes and the latter the lower classes. In such a view the real world silk–nylon difference is irrelevant– presumably many other material differences could also, and do also, transport this class distinction. But taken as mediators these fabrics would have to be engaged with by the analyst in their specificity: the internal real-world complexities of silk and nylon suddenly appear relevant, and are seen as actively constructing the ideological class distinction which they once merely reflected.
+For the committed ANT analyst, social things—like class distinctions in taste in the silk and nylon example, but also groups and power—must constantly be constructed or performed anew through complex engagements with complex mediators. There is no stand-alone social repertoire lying in the background to be reflected off, expressed through, or substantiated in, interactions (as in an intermediary conception).
+
+=== Reflexivity ===
+Bruno Latour's articulation of reflexivity in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) reframes it as an opportunity rather than a problem. His argument addresses the limitations of reflexivity as traditionally conceived in relativist epistemologies and replaces it with a pragmatic, relational approach tied to ANT's broader principles. Latour argues that the observer is merely one actor among many within the network, eliminating the problem of reflexivity as a paradox of status. Reflexivity instead emerges through the tangible work of navigating and translating between networks, requiring the observer to engage actively, like any other actor, in the labour of connection and translation. This grounded form of reflexivity enhances the observer's role as a "world builder" and reinforces ANT's emphasis on the relational and dynamic nature of knowledge creation.
+
+=== Hybridity ===
+The belief that neither a human nor a nonhuman is pure, in the sense that neither is human or nonhuman in an absolute sense, but rather beings created via interactions between the two. Humans are thus regarded as quasi-subjects, while nonhumans are regarded as quasi-objects.
+
+== Actor–network theory and specific disciplines ==
+Recently, there has been a movement to introduce actor network theory as an analytical tool to a range of applied disciplines outside of sociology, including nursing, public health, urban studies (Farias and Bender, 2010), and community, urban, and regional planning (Beauregard, 2012; Beauregard and Lieto, 2015; Rydin, 2012; Rydin and Tate, 2016, Tate, 2013).

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+
+=== International relations ===
+Actor–network theory has become increasingly prominent within the discipline of international relations and political science.
+Theoretically, scholars within IR have employed ANT in order to disrupt traditional world political binaries (civilised/barbarian, democratic/autocratic, etc.), consider the implications of a posthuman understanding of IR, explore the infrastructures of world politics, and consider the effects of technological agency.
+Empirically, IR scholars have drawn on insights from ANT in order to study phenomena including political violences like the use of torture and drones, piracy and maritime governance, and garbage.
+
+=== Design ===
+The actor–network theory can also be applied to design, using a perspective that is not simply limited to an analysis of an object's structure. From the ANT viewpoint, design is seen as a series of features that account for a social, psychological, and economical world. ANT argues that objects are designed to shape human action and mold or influence decisions. In this way, the objects' design serves to mediate human relationships and can even impact our morality, ethics, and politics.
+
+=== Literary criticism ===
+The literary critic Rita Felski has argued that ANT offers the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies vital new modes of interpreting and engaging with literary texts. She claims that Latour's model has the capacity to allow "us to wiggle out of the straitjacket of suspicion," and to offer meaningful solutions to the problems associated with critique. The theory has been crucial to her formulation of postcritique. Felski suggests that the purpose of applying ANT to literary studies "is no longer to diminish or subtract from the reality of the texts we study but to amplify their reality, as energetic coactors and vital partners."
+
+=== Anthropology of religion ===
+In the study of Christianity by anthropologists, the ANT has been employed in a variety of ways of understanding how humans interact with nonhuman actors. Some have been critical of the field of Anthropology of Religion in its tendency to presume that God is not a social actor. The ANT is used to problematize the role of God, as a nonhuman actor, and speak of how They affect religious practice. Others have used the ANT to speak of the structures and placements of religious buildings, especially in cross-cultural contexts, which can see architecture as agents making God's presence tangible.
+
+== ANT in practice ==
+ANT has been considered more than just a theory, but also a methodology. In fact, ANT is a useful method that can be applied in different studies. Moreover, with the development of the digital communication, ANT now is popular in being applied in science field like IS research. In addition, it widen the horizon of researchers from arts field as well.
+
+=== ANT in arts ===
+ANT is a big influencer in the development of design. In the past, researchers or scholars from design field mainly view the world as a human interactive situation. No matter what design we [who?] applied, it is for human's action. However, the idea of ANT now applies into design principle, where design starts to be viewed as a connector. As the view of design itself has changed, the design starts to be considered more important in daily lives. Scholars [who?] analyze how design shapes, connects, reflects, interacts our daily activities.
+ANT has also been widely applied in museums. ANT proposes that it is difficult to discern the 'hard' from the 'soft' components of the apparatus in curatorial practice; that the object 'in progress' of being curated is slick and difficult to separate from the setting of the experiment or the experimenter's identity.
+
+=== ANT in science ===
+In recent years, actor-network theory has gained a lot of traction, and a growing number of IS academics are using it explicitly in their research. Despite the fact that these applications vary greatly, all of the scholars cited below agree that the theory provides new notions and ideas for understanding the socio-technical character of information systems. Bloomfield present an intriguing case study of the development of a specific set of resource management information systems in the UK National Health Service, and they evaluate their findings using concepts from actor-network theory. The actor-network approach does not prioritize social or technological aspects, which mirrors the situation in the case study, where arguments about social structures and technology are intertwined within actors' discourse as they try to persuade others to align with their own goals. The research emphasizes the interpretative flexibility of information technology and systems, in the sense that seemingly similar systems produce drastically different outcomes in different locales as a result of the specific translation and network-building processes that occurred. They show how the boundary between the technological and the social, as well as the link between them, is the topic of constant battles and trials of strength in the creation of facts, rather than taking technology for granted.
+
+== Impact of ANT ==
+
+=== Contributions of nonhuman actors ===
+There are at least four contributions of nonhumans as actors in their ANT positions.

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+
+Nonhuman actors can be considered as a condition in human social activities. Through the human's formation of nonhuman actors such as durable materials, they provide a stable foundation for interactions in society. Reciprocally, nonhumans' actions and capacities serve as a condition for the possibility of the formation of society.
+In Latour's We Have Never Been Modern, his conceptual "parliament of things" consists of social, natural, and discourse together as hybrids. Although the interlocks between human actors and nonhumans effects the modernized society, this parliamentary setting based on nonhuman actors would eliminate such fake modernization, and changes the dichotomy between modern society and premodern society.
+Nonhuman actors can be considered as mediators. On the one hand, nonhumans could constantly modify relations between actors. On the other hand, nonhumans share the same features with other actors not solely as means for human actors. In this circumstance, nonhuman actors impact human interactions. It either creates an atmosphere for humans to agree with each other, or lead to conflict as the mediators.
+It is noticeable that the status of mediation is more affiliated with intermediaries or means as a stable presence in the corpus of ANT, while mediators function more powers to influence actors and networks. Technical mediation exerts itself on four dimensions: interference, composition, the folding of time and space, and crossing the boundary between signs and things.
+Nonhuman actors can be considered as members of moral and political associations. For example, noise is a nonhuman actor if the topic is applied to actor-network theory. Noise is the criteria for humans to regulate themselves to morality, and subject to the limitations inherent in some legal rules for its political effects. After nonhumans are visible actors through their associations with morality and politics, these collectives become inherently regulative principles in social networks.
+Nonhuman actors can be considered as gatherings. Alike nonhumans' impacts on morality and politics, they could gather actors from other times and spaces. Interacted with variable ontologies, times, spaces, and durability, nonhumans exert subtle influences within a network.
+
+== Criticism ==
+Some critics have argued that research based on ANT perspectives remains entirely descriptive and fails to provide explanations for social processes. ANT—like comparable social scientific methods—requires judgement calls from the researcher as to which actors are important within a network and which are not. Critics argue that the importance of particular actors cannot be determined in the absence of "out-of-network" criteria, such as is a logically proven fact about deceptively coherent systems given Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Similarly, others argue that actor-networks risk degenerating into endless chains of association (six degrees of separation—we are all networked to one another). Other research perspectives such as social constructionism, social shaping of technology, social network theory, normalization process theory, and diffusion of innovations theory are held to be important alternatives to ANT approaches.
+
+=== From STS itself and organizational studies ===
+Key early criticism came from other members of the STS community, in particular the "Epistemological Chicken" debate between Collins and Yearley with responses from Latour and Callon as well as Woolgar. In an article in Science as Practice and Culture, sociologist Harry Collins and his co-writer Steven Yearley argue that the ANT approach is a step backwards towards the positivist and realist positions held by early theory of science. Collins and Yearley accused ANTs approach of collapsing into an endless relativist regress.
+Whittle and organization studies professor André Spicer note that "ANT has also sought to move beyond deterministic models that trace organizational phenomena back to powerful individuals, social structures, hegemonic discourses or technological effects. Rather, ANT prefers to seek out complex patterns of causality rooted in connections between actors." They argue that ANT's ontological realism makes it "less well equipped for pursuing a critical account of organizations—that is, one which recognises the unfolding nature of reality, considers the limits of knowledge and seeks to challenge structures of domination." This implies that ANT does not account for pre-existing structures, such as power, but rather sees these structures as emerging from the actions of actors within the network and their ability to align in pursuit of their interests. Accordingly, ANT can be seen as an attempt to re-introduce Whig history into science and technology studies; like the myth of the heroic inventor, ANT can be seen as an attempt to explain successful innovators by saying only that they were successful. Likewise, for organization studies, Whittle and Spicer assert that ANT is, "ill-suited to the task of developing political alternatives to the imaginaries of market managerialism."
+
+=== Human agency ===
+Actor–network theory insists on the capacity of nonhumans to be actors or participants in networks and systems. Critics including figures such as Langdon Winner maintain that such properties as intentionality fundamentally distinguish humans from animals or from "things" (see Activity Theory). ANT scholars  [who?] respond with the following arguments:
+
+They do not attribute intentionality and similar properties to nonhumans.
+Their conception of agency does not presuppose intentionality.
+They locate agency neither in human "subjects" nor in nonhuman "objects", but in heterogeneous associations of humans and nonhumans.
+ANT has been criticized as amoral. Wiebe Bijker has responded to this criticism by stating that the amorality of ANT is not a necessity. Moral and political positions are possible, but one must first describe the network before taking up such positions. This position has been further explored by Stuart Shapiro who contrasts ANT with the history of ecology, and argues that research decisions are moral rather than methodological, but this moral dimension has been sidelined.
+
+=== Misnaming ===
+In a workshop called "On Recalling ANT", Latour himself stated that there are four things wrong with actor-network theory: "actor", "network", "theory" and the hyphen. In a later book, however, Latour reversed himself, accepting the wide use of the term, "including the hyphen." He further remarked how he had been helpfully reminded that the ANT acronym "was perfectly fit for a blind, myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, and collective traveler"—qualitative hallmarks of actor-network epistemology.

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+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:10.578747+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== See also ==
+Annemarie Mol
+Helen Verran
+Mapping controversies
+Science and technology studies (STS)
+Obligatory passage point (OPP)
+Social construction of technology (SCOT)
+Technology dynamics
+Theory of structuration (according to which neither agents nor social structure have primacy)
+Thing theory
+Outline of organizational theory
+
+== References ==
+
+== Further reading ==
+Carroll, N., Whelan, E., and Richardson, I. (2012). Service Science – an Actor Network Theory Approach. International Journal of Actor-Network Theory and Technological Innovation (IJANTTI), Volume 4, Number 3, pp. 52–70.
+Carroll, N. (2014). Actor-Network Theory: A Bureaucratic View of Public Service Innovation. Chapter 7, p. 115-144. In Ed Tatnall (ed). Technological Advancements and the Impact of Actor-Network Theory, IGI Global.
+Online version of the article "On Actor Network Theory: A Few Clarifications", in which Latour responds to criticisms. Archived 2021-04-26 at the Wayback Machine
+Introductory article "Dolwick, JS. 2009. The 'Social' and Beyond: Introducing Actor–Network Theory", which includes an analysis of other social theories
+ANThology. Ein einführendes Handbuch zur Akteur–Netzwerk-Theorie, von Andréa Belliger und David Krieger, transcript Verlag (German)
+Transhumanism as Actor-Network Theory "N00bz & the Actor-Network: Transhumanist Traductions" Archived 2010-10-08 at the Wayback Machine (Humanity+ Magazine) by Woody Evans.
+John Law (1992). "Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity."
+John Law (1987). "Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion." In W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes, and T.J. Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
+Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Diana Graizbord, and Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz. 2013. "Actor-Network Theory and the ethnographic imagination: An exercise in translation". Qualitative Sociology Volume 36, Issue 4, pp 323–341.
+Seio Nakajima. 2013. "Re-imagining Civil Society in Contemporary Urban China: Actor-Network-Theory and Chinese Independent Film Consumption." Qualitative Sociology Volume 36, Issue 4, pp 383–402. [1]
+Isaac Marrero-Guillamón. 2013. "Actor-Network Theory, Gabriel Tarde and the Study of an Urban Social Movement: The Case of Can Ricart, Barcelona." Qualitative Sociology Volume 36, Issue 4, pp 403–421. [2]
+John Law and Vicky Singleton. 2013. "ANT and Politics: Working in and on the World Archived 2021-04-27 at the Wayback Machine". Qualitative Sociology Volume 36, Issue 4, pp 485–502.
+
+== External links ==
+John Law's actor-network theory resource
+Bruno Latour's Page
+Normalization Process Theory toolkit Archived 2021-04-26 at the Wayback Machine
+Reassembling Ethnography: Actor-Network Theory and Sociology

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+title: "Applied epistemology"
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+
+Applied epistemology refers to the study that determines whether the systems of investigation that seek the truth lead to true beliefs about the world. A specific conceptualization cites that it attempts to reveal whether these systems contribute to epistemic aims. It is applied in practices outside of philosophy like science and mathematics.
+Once applied epistemology is described as a method in an epistemological search, it implies that the methodology is supported by an epistemological foundation.
+
+== Background ==
+Applied epistemology forms part of the concept of "applied philosophy" as theorists begin to distinguish it from "applied ethics". It is argued that "applied philosophy" is a broader field, and that it has parts that are not subdisciplines of applied ethics. The emergence of "applied philosophy" gained traction after it was proposed that philosophy can be applied to contemporary issues.
+Applied epistemology emerged from epistemologists routine examinations that determine whether truth-seeking practices like science and mathematics are capable of delivering truths. It draws from epistemological theorizing to address pressing epistemic matters of practical value. An epistemological question assumes a philosophical form once it deals with the type of knowledge or justification that is presupposed in most ordinary contexts.
+In its infancy, applied epistemology had been equated with social epistemology. Later theorizing established that, while there are overlapping aspects, not all social epistemology is applied and not all applied epistemology is social. A proposed analogy to distinguish applied epistemology from epistemology holds that it involves the general opposition between theory and application. In applied epistemology, theories in epistemology are applied for solving practical problems. The theoretical constructions in this environment can be modified or reorganized in function of the primary target.
+
+== Concept ==
+
+Applied epistemology is informed by skepticism in philosophy, as it maintains that things should not be taken at face value – that, in reflection, what people knew as "truths" could turn out to be false. Applied epistemology has been concerned with practical questions about truth, knowledge, and other epistemic values but these are not all social questions. It asks questions about what we know and are justified in believing.
+Applied epistomology is also considered one of the three branches of epistemology along with normative epistemology and metaepistemology. The normative branch is concerned with first-order theorizing about the formation of justified beliefs, knowledge, and truths. Metaepistemology, on the other hand, deals with higher order epistemological questions, particularly, the fundamental aspects of epistemic theorizing. According to philosopher Richard Fumerton, metaepistemology is concerned with questions about what knowledge – including justification, rationality, and evidence – is. A conceptualization cites that the applied epistemologist operates within a background of naturalist metaepistemology and reliabilist first-order epistemology.
+The following table demonstrates the place of applied epistemology in relation to epistemology and to the parallels between ethics and epistemology covering a specific topic according to Mark Battersby. Other philosophers have different conceptions of the relationships.
+
+The main domains of applied epistemology include education and pedagogy, therapy, politics, science and technology, arts, and artificial intelligence.
+
+== Applications ==
+As part of "applied philosophy", applied epistemology has been applied to different contemporary practices and issues. This include its application to critical thinking or informal logic, information systems, and pressing social concerns. In the area of critical thinking, there is the underlying idea that thinking clearly and carefully about any issue needs the understanding and application of fundamental epistemological concepts. Theorists draw from philosophical theories to address real-life epistemic issues.
+
+=== Communication ===
+According to V.D. Singh, since general semantics is a general theory of evaluation – that it considers the interrelations among events that transpire within ourselves and the world around us as well as how he obtain information or talk about such events and how we behave – makes it an up-to-date and scientifically based applied epistemology. Scholars cite the case of fake news as an issue that can be addressed by applied epistemology. It is posited that corrupted or fake information can be unmasked through an epistemological investigation that answers three questions: 1. What is fake news?; 2. What are the mechanisms that foster the production and spread of fake news; and, 3. which interventions can address it?
+
+=== Scientific research ===
+Applied epistemology in science has been described as the specific mental frameworks utilized by scientists in their research and activities that are considered processes of acquiring knowledge. These frameworks also serve as the ground of the sociology of science. There is also the case of the philosophy of science, which provides epistemic justifications for scientific reasoning and choice. It is considered an applied epistemology due to the characterization that it is precise, formal, and normative.
+An example of the deployment of applied epistemology in scientific research is the Toolbox Project. It is an initiative that apply philosophical analysis to enhance collaborative, cross-disciplinary scientific research by improving cross-disciplinary communication. There are also scholars who consider the application of epistemologically relevant psychology to science as applied epistemology. Aside from its role in scientific and technological advancement, the concept is also applied in the areas of ethics and policy. It is argued that the instincts that guide actual scientific practice are yet to be fully recognized, scrutinized, and justified.

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+---
+
+=== Informal logic ===
+According to Mark Battersby, the method of critical thinking or informal logic can be considered a form of applied epistemology. This method involves the assessment of the strength of evidences that afford conclusions can only be made if the domain within which the argument is presented is taken into account. For Battersby, this constitutes applied epistemology, since it is about grounding assessments of arguments as they occur within them. Mark Weinstein maintained that a focus on the account of how acceptability is transmitted from premises to conclusion show close theoretical parallel between informal logic and applied epistemology. It is argued that rather than rules of logic, epistemological norms constitute the philosophical core of informal logic and that there is a close parallel between informal logic and applied ethics. Based on these factors, scholars such as Battersby and Weinstein maintain that informal logic should be classified as applied epistemology instead of logic.
+
+=== Social issues ===
+It has been suggested by scholars such as Jennifer Lackey that applied epistemology provides the tools in contemporary epistemology's evaluation of the issues of social concern. It is relevant to issues affecting social groups since it helps in answering the recurring practical question, "what to believe now". Applied epistemology is also considered capable of unmasking the contribution of the features of public deliberation to a group's reliability and provide a basis for a reliabilist rationale for democracy in the process. Applied epistemology has also been employed in examining feminism, particularly with respect to the evaluation of the agency of women and what is the relevance of giving it authorial primacy within studies of knowledge.
+
+=== Information studies ===
+According to Tim Gorichanaz, applied epistemology allows information studies to benefit from the field of philosophy particularly since it rarely focuses on the evaluation of epistemic concepts. It is also suggested that applying the concept to information system can bridge the information processing models of cognition and constructivist perspectives on knowledge. Applied epistemology can be prominent in the "schema" or the cognitive organization of meaningful information. Specifically, it is the information structure that can be modified to represent knowledge of interrelationships between events, objects, and situations that we encounter.
+
+=== Psychology ===
+Applied epistemology is relevant to the field of psychology and cognitive science as it focuses on the study of particular epistemic problems and processes and is characterized as part of an empirical field. It addresses how cognitive agents go about constructing epistemically adequate representations of the world. The content of the psychological experts or therapists' cognitive organization or "knowing" processes has also been described as applied epistemology. This system of knowing allows a better understanding of a patient's problems. It also represents part of the knowledge system in which interventions that facilitate change can be drawn.
+
+=== Law ===
+Legal epistemology is considered a form of applied epistemology for its evaluation of whether legal systems of investigation that seeks the truth are structured in a manner that actually lead to justified and true beliefs. Applied epistemics allows the legal system to draw from philosophy. For instance, David Hume stated that, "we entertain a suspicion concerning any matter of fact, when the witnesses contradict each other; when they are but few, or a doubtful character; when they have an interest in what they affirm; when they deliver their testimony with hesitation, or on the contrary, with too violent asseverations."  This generic view is said to allow legal procedure the effective evaluation of testimonies.
+
+=== Philosophy ===
+Applied epistemology is also used in evaluating philosophical issues. This is the case when empirical perspective is applied to test philosophical theories. While this approach does not eliminate analytic and conceptual issues, it can make them clearer. It also increases the probability of theorists to examine evidences that tend to be overlooked.
+
+=== Cybernetics ===
+Applied epistemology is also significant in cybernetics, which involves the control and communication of living and man-made systems. Modern cybernetics, particularly, is considered an applied epistemology for its focus on how the process of the construction of models of the systems is influenced by the living and man-made systems in its goal of understanding the similarities and differences of the inner workings of the organic and machine processes. Once applied to cybernetics, applied epistemology also contributes in shaping responses to global and local issues since it helps construct a type of political epistemology that can lead to a holistic and socially responsible discourse and practice.
+
+== References ==

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+title: "Biology and political science"
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+---
+
+The interdisciplinary study of biology and political science is the application of theories and methods from the field of biology toward the scientific understanding of political behavior. The field is sometimes called biopolitics, a term that will be used in this article as a synonym although it has other, less related meanings. More generally, the field has also been called "politics and the life sciences".
+
+
+== History ==
+
+During the 19th century, some scholars and philosophers made attempts to apply concepts derived from the natural sciences in the understanding of society and politics. This was greatly influenced by positivism and Darwinism.
+
+In The Social Organism (1860), Herbert Spencer compares society fo a living organism, he states that just like biological species evolve through natural selection, societies evolve through analogous processes.
+
+Another proponent of Social Darwinism, was Francis Galton, Darwin's nephew, whose ideas were the basis of behaviourial genetics and eugenics. He claimed that mental qualities (genius and talent), just like physical traits, where inherited among generations of people. He claimed that society should change so that heredity was a conscious decision, to avoid both over-breeding by less fit members of society and the under-breeding of the more fit ones. In Galton's view, social institutions such as welfare and insane asylums allowed inferior humans to survive and reproduce faster than the superior humans in respectable spheres of society.
+Many scholars link social darwinism to the appearance of "scientific racism", and thus it is considered a possible influence for Nazism and other genocidal regimes.
+Friedrich Ratzel considered that states, just like organisms need to expand or perish, he coined the term Lebensraum, which the Third Reich used as justification for its expansionism.
+Rudolf Kjellén, as Ratzel's student, would continue his work on organic state theory, coining the term geopolitics
+The field can be said to originate with the 1968 manifesto of Albert Somit, Towards a more Biologically Oriented Political Science, which appeared in the Midwest Journal of Political Science. The term "biopolitics" was appropriated for this area of study by Thomas Thorton, who used it as the title of his 1970 book.
+The Association for Politics and the Life Sciences was formed in 1981 and exists to study the field of biopolitics as a subfield of political science. APLS owns and publishes an academic peer-reviewed journal called Politics and the Life Sciences (PLS). The journal is edited in the United States at the University of Maryland, College Park’s School of Public Policy, in Maryland.
+By the late 1990s and since, biopolitics research has expanded rapidly, especially in the areas of evolutionary theory, genetics, and neuroscience.
+The historical link between biology and politics on the one hand, and sociological organicism on the other, is inescapable. The essential difference here is that the early modern application of biological ideas to politics revolved around the idea that society was a ‘social organism’, whereas the subject this article describes expressly sets out to separate the essential logic of the association of biology to human social life, from this earlier model. Hence the emphasis upon ‘politics’, denoting the primacy of the individual who engages in social life, as in political behaviour, underpinned by biological foundations. In this sense the rise of Biopolitics represents the replacement of sociological organicism that had been eradicated by the end of the Second World War, with an acceptable form of political organicism. Some discussion bearing on this point may be found in Biology and Politics : Recent Explorations by Albert Somit, 1976, which is a collection of essays, one brief essay by William Mackenzie is Biopolitics : A Minority Viewpoint, in which he talks about the ‘founding father’ of Biopolitics as being Morley Roberts, because of his 1938 book of that name. But Roberts was not using the term in its modern, politically sanitized sense, but in the context of society viewed as a true living being, a social organism. And in a reply to Somit's Towards a more Biologically Oriented Political Science, published in the same journal, we find Some Questions about a More Biologically Oriented Political Science by Jerone Stephens, which sets out to warn against lurching back into the errors of previous venturers into the realms of biology and politics, as in sociological organicism.
+
+
+== Topics ==
+Topics addressed in political science from these perspectives include: public opinion and criminal justice attitudes, political ideology, (e.g. the correlates of biology and political orientation), origins of party systems, voting behavior, and warfare. Debates persist inside the field and out, regarding genetic and biological determinism. Important recent surveys of leading research in biopolitics have been published in the journals Political Psychology and Science.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Biology and political orientation
+Genopolitics
+Moral psychology
+Neuropolitics
+Political psychology
+Sociobiology
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+Robert Blank (2001). Biology and Political Science. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-20436-1.
+Jonathan Haidt (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon. ISBN 978-0-307-90703-5. haidt righteous mind.
+Peter K. Hatemi; Rose McDermott (2011). Man Is by Nature a Political Animal: Evolution, Biology, and Politics. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-31911-7.
+Steven A. Peterson; Albert Somit (2011). Biology and Politics: The Cutting Edge. Emerald Group Publishing. ISBN 978-0-85724-579-3.

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+title: "Bold hypothesis"
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+---
+
+Bold hypothesis (or bold conjecture, the terms are used interchangeably) is a concept originally created by the liberal philosopher Karl Popper when he tried to define the meaning of scientific thinking and scientific progress. It was first explained in his debut The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935) and subsequently elaborated in writings such as Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963), Objective knowledge: an evolutionary approach (1972), and Replies to my critics (1974). In successive texts written in the course of four decades, Popper added some nuances to the definition of the concept.
+Broadly speaking, the idea of a bold hypothesis refers to a new, testable theoretical proposition (or theoretical claim) made within a subject area which, if it is true, would be able to explain and predict much more about the subject than was previously possible. It would significantly alter existing scientific understandings about the subject, in a positive way. The new idea would be very useful for scientific research about the subject. This contrasts with other types of scientific claims which, if they turn out to be true, make little difference to what scientists already know about the subject. The contrary of a bold hypothesis is an "ad hoc hypothesis" which protects a well-established scientific theory from refutation, by means of some convenient modification of this theory which has no new testable consequences. Alan F. Chalmers summarizes that, in Popper's philosophy of science,
+
+"A very good theory will be one that makes very wideranging claims about the world, and which is consequently highly falsifiable, and is one that resists falsification whenever it is put to the test."
+The idea of a "bold hypothesis" is nowadays widely used in the philosophy of science and in the philosophy of knowledge. It is also used in the social, historical and physical sciences, to refer to "significant new ways to understand something". Bold hypotheses are often understood to be an important ingredient of major scientific breakthroughs, scientific progress and scientific innovation. Bold hypotheses can help to move scientific understanding forward, by creating new concepts and formulations to understand something and testing them out. That is also why bold hypotheses have an important place in Karl Popper's theory of scientific progress. 
+However, when bold hypotheses are formulated, they don't necessarily meet all the scientific criteria required to test them yet. And not all of them survive the scientific tests that are eventually done. Some hypotheses stand up to the evidence, while others do not. Testing a bold hypothesis conclusively can be difficult. It can sometimes take a long time, before a bold hypothesis is definitely accepted or rejected. There are also bold hypotheses which, although they were ultimately rejected after relevant tests, nevertheless triggered a lot of new and valuable ideas about what might (or might not) be the case. They might help to rule out a lot of possibilities, and focus the research with new leads. Sometimes it is helpful to know what cannot be true, in order to find out what is true.
+
+== Brief explanation ==
+Karl Popper's argument was that scientific progress occurs through formulating bold hypotheses, and trying to refute (disprove or falsify) them. Popper believed that:
+
+"The advance of science is not due to the fact that more and more perceptual experiences accumulate in the course of time. Nor is it due to the fact that we are making ever better use of our senses. Out of uninterpreted sense-experiences science cannot be distilled, no matter how industriously we gather and sort them. Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature: our only organon, our only instrument, for grasping her. And we must hazard them to win our prize. Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game." 
+He makes this point more specific in a 1953 lecture, where he argues that, if we aim to explain the world, then:
+
+"... there is no more rational procedure than the method of trial and error – of conjecture and refutation: of boldly proposing theories; of trying our best to show that these are erroneous; and of accepting them tentatively if our critical efforts are unsuccessful. From the point of view here developed, all laws, all theories, remain essentially tentative, or conjectural, or hypothetical, even when we feel unable to doubt them any longer." 
+In his 1974 reply to critics, Popper described the concept of bold hypotheses some more:  
+
+“Bold ideas are new, daring, hypotheses or conjectures. And severe attempts at refutations are severe critical discussions and severe empirical tests. When is a conjecture daring and when is it not daring, in the sense here proposed? Answer: it is daring if and only if it takes a great risk of being false – if matters could be otherwise, and seem at the time to be otherwise.”
+He added that the characteristic of bold conjectures, in combination with tests and refutations, is what distinguishes science from non-science, from prescientific myths and from metaphysics:

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+title: "Bold hypothesis"
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+category: "reference"
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+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+”There is a reality behind the world as it appears to us, possibly a many-layered reality, of which the appearances are the outermost layers. What the great scientist does is boldly to guess, daringly to conjecture, what these inner realities are like. (…) The boldness can be gauged by the distance between the world of appearance and the conjectured reality, the explanatory hypotheses. But there is another, a special kind of boldness – the boldness of predicting aspects of the world of appearance which so far have been overlooked but which it must possess if the conjectured reality is (more or less) right, if the explanatory hypotheses are (approximately) true. It is this more special kind of boldness which I have usually in mind when I speak of bold scientific conjectures. It is the boldness of a conjecture which takes a real risk – the risk of being tested and refuted; the risk of clashing with reality. Thus my proposal was, and is, that it is this second boldness, together with the readiness to look out for tests and refutations, which distinguishes “empirical” science from nonscience, and especially from prescientific myths and metaphysics.” 
+This passage makes it very clear, that the idea of bold hypotheses also has a central role in Popper's solution for the demarcation problem, i.e. the problem of how scientific knowledge and scientific practice can be distinguished from non-scientific beliefs and practices.
+
+=== Defining the boldness of hypotheses ===
+A "bold" hypothesis is a new scientific idea which, if it was true, would be able to predict and/or explain a lot, or a lot more, about the subject  being theorized about.  The "boldness" of a scientific hypothesis can be evaluated with the following criteria:
+
+Testability: the degree to which the hypothesis can be comprehensively tested (or, the extent to which the hypothesis can be definitely proved right or wrong, with available scientific methods).
+Risk: the likelihood that the hypothesis which is to be tested will turn out to be wrong when tests are carried out.
+Novelty: the extent to which the hypothesis represents a genuinely new departure from what scientists already know from established scientific ideas (or compared to background knowledge).
+Heuristic power: whether the hypothesis stimulates new, innovative research that goes beyond the conventional or established approaches.
+Predictive power: whether the hypothesis enables genuinely new and better predictions involving new phenomena (or forecasts which are not trivial), if the hypothesis is true.
+Scientific impact: whether the hypothesis would have a major impact on existing scientific thinking, if it is true (or, how much it could change scientific thinking or scientific theory).
+Explanatory power/depth: the scope or reach of the hypothesis – the size, number and variety of phenomena which it would explain, if it is true.
+
+=== Testing hypotheses ===
+Once a bold hypothesis has been mooted, Popper argues, scientists try to investigate and test how well the bold hypothesis can stand up to the known evidence. They try to find counter-arguments that would refute or falsify the bold hypothesis. In this process of testing and criticism, new scientific knowledge is generated. Even if the bold hypothesis turns out to have been wrong, testing it may well generate useful knowledge about what can and cannot be the case. Often it stimulates new research.
+Inversely, if a hypothesis lacks the quality of boldness, then it would make very little difference to what scientists already know. It is not "a big deal", i.e. it is not very significant for the knowledge which exists already. It contributes little to advancing scientific progress, because it does not expand or add anything much to scientific understanding.
+
+=== Tentative knowledge ===
+According to Popper,
+
+"Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or ‘given’ base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being." " 
+In one of his later writings, Objective Knowledge (1972), Popper argued that:
+
+"A theory is the bolder the greater its content. It is also the riskier: it is the more probable to start with that it will be false. We try to find its weak points, to refute it. If we fail to refute it, or if the refutations we find are at the same time also refutations of the weaker theory which was its predecessor, then we have reason to suspect, or to conjecture, that the stronger theory has no greater falsity content than its weaker predecessor, and, therefore, that it has the greater degree of verisimilitude". 
+This interpretation was criticized by Adolf Grünbaum.
+
+== Main criticisms ==
+Popper's idea of the role of bold hypotheses in scientific progress has attracted four main kinds of criticisms. These concern (1) the meaning of "boldness", (2) the issue of testability, (3) the issue of falsifiability, and (4) the realities of normal science.
+
+=== Boldness issue ===
+The idea of a bold hypothesis is itself somewhat fuzzy, because exactly "how bold is bold" in scientific boldness? 

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+title: "Bold hypothesis"
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+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bold_hypothesis"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:16.007133+00:00"
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+---
+
+Is boldness always a good thing in scientific hypothesizing? How we assess the degree of boldness may just be a subjective matter (it may depends on how you care to look at it).
+Some new ideas, although they are rather modest in themselves, can make a very large difference to the advancement of scientific research.
+At a more concrete level, the degree of "boldness" could refer (i) to the content of the hypothesis (considered relative to other possible hypotheses), or (ii) to the manner or context in which the hypothesis is presented, (iii) to its expected importance for research, or (iv) to the attitude involved. The degree of boldness could be downplayed for the sake of credibility or compatibility with established ideas, or it could be exaggerated to create the image of a "big scientific breakthrough" (to obtain research funding).
+The timing of the evaluation of a hypothesis is also important: a hypothesis which does not seem "bold" right now, could be judged "very bold" later, when historians know much more about the full impact it turned out to have (and vice versa). Alan F. Chalmers comments that “What rates as a bold conjecture at one stage in the history of science may no longer be bold at some later stage.” Scientists may not know in advance exactly how bold a hypothesis actually is, even if they know it is a very new idea. The degree of "boldness" of a new hypothesis may be admitted only in the light of a rational reconstruction of the history of a science. A truth discovered at the margins of society may later go mainstream, and eventually become accepted by most people, although that was not foreseen when the discovery was made. Inversely, a hypothesis which seemed really bold at the time it was first mooted, can later appear to have been "not such a big deal".
+A fashionable scientist with a lot of sponsors might be presented as doing new and bold things, while in reality it was more hype than substance.
+So it remains somewhat fuzzy what kinds of criteria or relativizations we might use, to credit new hypotheses as "bold" or not. There could be an element of propaganda in the "boldness" attributed to a scientific idea.
+
+=== Testability issue ===
+In Popper's philosophy of science, scientific statements are always provisional, they have limits of application, and they could always be wrong. If a statement cannot even in principle be proved wrong, it cannot be a scientific statement. Thus, in Popper's eyes, the falsifiability criterion clearly demarcates "science" from "non-science". 
+This Popperian idea has been very controversial, however. The reason is that it can be quite difficult to test scientifically how true a particular idea is. Even if scientists do want to test an idea, they may not know yet how exactly to test it conclusively. Yet, scientists also don't want to abandon a hunch that seems useful, simply because they don't know how to verify it yet. This point is especially important for "bold" new hypotheses, because the very "boldness" of the new hypothesis could mean that it would take a lot of work before adequate tests could be designed and carried out.
+Some philosophers have argued that, in the real world, scientists operate routinely with at least some metaphysical beliefs for which they have no proof or verification whatsoever. In fact, in The logic of scientific discovery, Karl Popper admits that this is the case:
+
+“I do not… go so far as to assert that metaphysics has no value for empirical science. (…) looking at the matter from the psychological angle, I am inclined to think that scientific discovery is impossible without faith in ideas which are of a purely speculative kind, and sometimes even quite hazy; a faith which is completely unwarranted from the point of view of science, and which, to that extent, is ‘metaphysical’.”
+Nevertheless Popper considered it his task to formulate a logical model of the method of empirical science, in which psychological factors or speculative/metaphysical thought play no role.
+According to Paul Feyerabend, the creative processes that lead to a scientific discovery are usually quite reasonable and non-arbitrary. However, the creative processes are by no means fully "rational", and they can be quite unique. Therefore, he argued, the idea that there is one standard model which can define the rationality of all scientific methods should be rejected. This contrasts with Karl Popper's view that "Just as chess might be defined by the rules proper to it, so empirical science may be defined by means of its methodological rules".
+
+=== Falsifiability issue ===
+The philosopher Imre Lakatos argued (against Karl Popper's interpretation) that scientists do not aim to test bold hypotheses in order to falsify them; instead, scientists aim mainly to confirm hypotheses. 

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+title: "Bold hypothesis"
+chunk: 4/4
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bold_hypothesis"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:16.007133+00:00"
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+---
+
+A falsified conjecture shows the scientist only "what he does not know" or what cannot be the case. However, in reality scientists are more interested in knowing what is the case, and what they can know. That is, scientists are interested mainly in gaining positive new knowledge, which can be used for practical purposes. Scientists are not primarily interested in “knowing that they don't know things”, or in "knowing what is not the case" (other than to rule out possibilities). Scientists want to know what really is the case. Scientific statements according to this Lakatosian perspective are not falsifiable statements, as Karl Popper claimed, but fallible statements. There is an important difference. Falsifiable ideas are testable ideas which can be definitely proved to be false. Fallible statements are testable statements that could be wrong. Fallible statements include both testable propositions and statements of which it is known that they could be wrong, although currently we do not know how to test them yet for their truth or falsity (or, the possible tests are technically not yet feasible).
+According to Lakatos, all scientific statements are in reality fallible hypotheses, which scientists at the very least intend or aim to test for their truth-content. This contrasts with metaphysical ideas which are by their very nature not scientifically testable (one can only believe them, or not). In this respect Lakatos and Popper agree. Contrary to Popper's philosophy, however, Lakatos did not regard scientific progress simply as a "trial and error" process, "the bolder the better". It is certainly true that scientists must try things out, and that they can get it wrong. But not just "anything goes"; scientific research is guided by definite "do's and don'ts" learnt from experience, which Lakatos calls "positive heuristics" and "negative heuristics". These heuristics provide guidance for the path of a research programme, by suggesting strategies which are more likely to obtain good results, and strategies which are unlikely to get results.
+Lakatos believed Popper's philosophy was inconsistent, because Popper claimed that "definitive falsification" is possible, while also claiming at the same time that "absolute positive proof" of a hypothesis is impossible. In Lakatos's view of science, neither of these claims is actually true. There exist no "crucial experiments" which can either prove or disprove a hypothesis conclusively for all time. We can rarely be absolutely certain about (1) the extent to which the results of tests for a hypothesis show the true nature of objective reality, and (2) the extent to which the results are caused by the design of the tests themselves (due to aspects of the experimental design or research assumptions). All that really happens, Lakatos argues, is that scientists decide to accept the results of important or comprehensive tests as definitive "for all intents and purposes", although, in principle, that methodological decision could later on still be overturned. For example, it happens sometimes that the FDA or EFSA approves the sale of a foodstuff or a medicine after scientific tests, but later reverses the decision, in the light of more or newer tests (the product is taken out of the market). According to this Lakatosian interpretation, the results of scientific tests are never the "absolute or final truth", or "absolute true knowledge", and they always retain a fallible status - they could in principle always be proved wrong later, through renewed tests inspired by new theories. Popper admitted that this is the case, but according to Lakatos, he did not fully think through the implication, i.e. that absolute falsification of a theoretical proposition is strictly speaking impossible (even if, for all intents and purposes, scientists consider it to have been definitely refuted).
+
+== Glamour versus "normal" science ==
+Thomas Kuhn argued that Popper's interpretation does not provide a very realistic picture of what most scientists actually do, most of the time. He argued that Popper focused on the “glamorous” side of scientific work in the "revolutionary" episodes of a science, when old solutions are questioned and are not effective anymore, and radically new approaches are being tried out. In Popper's own words, “It is the working of great scientists that I have in my mind as my paradigm for science”. In much, if not most, scientific work in the real world, Kuhn claims, scientists are not mooting bold hypotheses that could overturn established views. Instead, they are working patiently on systematic, detailed tests of a small facet of a much larger theory or research paradigm; Kuhn called this practice "normal science". Thus, scientific progress may come about, not because somebody has a grandiose new idea, but instead because the careful testing of the details of a theory eventually provides definitive scientific conclusions that are generally accepted.
+
+== Continuing relevance ==
+Despite these important criticisms, Popper's concept of bold hypotheses continues to be widely used in the academic world. One reason is that, at some level, the concept does make sense, even if (arguably) Popper himself failed to define its role in scientific research very well. Another reason is that academic progress always requires that a scholar does something genuinely new and "breaks new ground". If a scholar only concerns themself with tiny, uncontroversial and fairly trivial claims, they are unlikely to be rewarded very much for their effort. Plausible and credible bold hypotheses are highly valued in the academic world, so long as they are reasonably consistent with (or cohere with) well-established scientific findings, and do not seriously challenge scientific authority. 
+In the business community, too, innovation is very important, to find new ways to reduce costs, increase productivity and sales, and raise profits. A bold new idea can be worth a lot of money, and therefore, business people are often sympathetic to bold attempts to reframe what is known already and to create new ideas; without such innovations, they would eventually be defeated by competitors who have a better idea. So the idea of a bold hypothesis also continues to have a place in economics, management theory and business administration.
+
+== See also ==
+Ad hoc hypothesis
+Courage
+Creativity
+Critical rationalism
+Criticism
+Criticism of science
+Criticisms of anti-scientific viewpoints
+Discovery (observation)
+Epistemology
+Experiment
+Fallibilism
+Falsifiability
+Growth of knowledge
+Hypothesis
+Normal science
+Occam's razor
+Outline of scientific method
+Philosophy of science
+Problem of induction
+Pseudoscience
+Scientific method
+Scientific progress
+Scientific theory
+Testability
+Varieties of criticism
+Verifiability (science)
+Verisimilitude
+
+== Notes and references ==

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+title: "Science studies"
+chunk: 1/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:09.263367+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Science studies  is an interdisciplinary research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in broad social, historical, and philosophical contexts. It uses various methods to analyze the production, representation and reception of scientific knowledge and its epistemic and semiotic role.
+Similarly to cultural studies, science studies are defined by the subject of their research and encompass a large range of different theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. The interdisciplinary approach may include and borrow methods from the humanities, natural and formal sciences, from scientometrics to ethnomethodology or cognitive science. 
+Science studies have a certain importance for evaluation and science policy. Overlapping with the field of science, technology and society, practitioners study the relationship between science and technology, and the interaction of expert and lay knowledge in the public realm.
+
+== Scope ==
+The field started with a tendency toward navel-gazing: it was extremely self-conscious in its genesis and applications. From early concerns with scientific discourse, practitioners soon started to deal with the relation of scientific expertise to politics and lay people. Practical examples include bioethics, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), pollution, global warming, biomedical sciences, physical sciences, natural hazard predictions, the (alleged) impact of the Chernobyl disaster in the UK, generation and review of science policy and risk governance and its historical and geographic contexts. While staying a discipline with multiple metanarratives, the fundamental concern is about the role of the perceived expert in providing governments and local authorities with information from which they can make decisions.
+The approach poses various important questions about what makes an expert and how experts and their authority are to be distinguished from the lay population and interacts with the values and policy making process in liberal democratic societies.
+Practitioners examine the forces within and through which scientists investigate specific phenomena such as
+
+technological milieus, epistemic instruments and cultures and laboratory life (compare Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger)
+science and technology (e.g. Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Thomas P. Hughes)
+science, technology and society (e.g. Peter Weingart, Ulrike Felt, Helga Nowotny and Reiner Grundmann)
+language and  rhetoric of science (e.g. Charles Bazerman, Alan G. Gross, Greg Myers)
+aesthetics of science and visual culture in science (u.a. Peter Geimer), the role of aesthetic criteria in scientific practice (compare mathematical beauty) and the relation between emotion, cognition and rationality in the development of science.
+semiotic studies of creative processes, as in the discovery, conceptualization, and realization of new ideas. or the interaction and management of different forms of knowledge in cooperative research.
+large-scale research and research institutions, e.g. particle colliders (Sharon Traweek)
+research ethics, science policy, and the role of the university.
+
+== History of the field ==
+In 1935, in a celebrated paper, the Polish sociologist couple Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski proposed the founding of a "science of science" to study the scientific enterprise, its practitioners, and the factors influencing their work. Earlier, in 1923, the Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki had made a similar proposal. 
+Fifty years before Znaniecki, in 1873, Aleksander Głowacki, better known in Poland by his pen name "Bolesław Prus", had delivered a public lecture – later published as a booklet – On Discoveries and Inventions, in which he said:

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+
+Until now there has been no science that describes the means for making discoveries and inventions, and the generality of people, as well as many people of learning, believe that there never will be.  This is an error.  Someday a science of making discoveries and inventions will exist and will render services.  It will arise not all at once; first only its general outline will appear, which subsequent researchers will correct and elaborate, and which still later researchers will apply to individual branches of knowledge.
+It is striking that, while early 20th-century sociologist proponents of a discipline to study science and its practitioners wrote in general theoretical terms, Prus had already half a century earlier described, with many specific examples, the scope and methods of such a discipline.
+Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) increased interest both in the history of science and in science's philosophical underpinnings. Kuhn posited that the history of science was less a linear succession of discoveries than a succession of paradigms within the philosophy of science. Paradigms are broader, socio-intellectual constructs that determine which types of truth claims are permissible. 
+Science studies seeks to identify key dichotomies – such as those between science and technology, nature and culture, theory and experiment, and science and fine art – leading to the differentiation of scientific fields and practices. 
+The sociology of scientific knowledge arose at the University of Edinburgh, where David Bloor and his colleagues developed what has been termed "the strong programme". It proposed that both "true" and "false" scientific theories should be treated the same way. Both are informed by social factors such as cultural context and self-interest. 
+Human knowledge, abiding as it does within human cognition, is ineluctably influenced by social factors.
+It proved  difficult, however, to address natural-science topics with sociological methods, as was abundantly evidenced by the US science wars. Use of a deconstructive approach (as in relation to works on arts or religion) to the natural sciences risked endangering not only the "hard facts" of the natural sciences, but the objectivity and positivist tradition of sociology itself. The view on scientific knowledge production as a (at least partial) social construct was not easily accepted.  Latour and others identified a dichotomy crucial for modernity, the division between nature (things, objects) as being transcendent, allowing to detect them, and society (the subject, the state) as immanent as being artificial, constructed. The dichotomy allowed for mass production of things (technical-natural hybrids) and large-scale global issues that endangered the distinction as such. E.g. We Have Never Been Modern asks to reconnect the social and natural worlds, returning to the pre-modern use of "thing"—addressing objects as hybrids made and scrutinized by the public interaction of people, things, and concepts.
+Science studies scholars such as Trevor Pinch and Steve Woolgar started already in the 1980s to involve "technology", and called their field "science, technology and society". This "turn to technology" brought science studies into communication with academics in science, technology, and society programs.
+More recently, a novel approach known as mapping controversies has been gaining momentum among science studies practitioners, and was introduced as a course for students in engineering, and architecture schools. In 2002 Harry Collins and Robert Evans asked for a third wave of science studies (a pun on The Third Wave), namely studies of expertise and experience answering to recent tendencies to dissolve the boundary between experts and the public.
+
+== Application to natural and man-made hazards ==
+
+=== Sheepfarming after Chernobyl ===
+
+A showcase of the rather complex problems of scientific information and its interaction with lay persons is Brian Wynne's study of Sheepfarming in Cumbria after the Chernobyl disaster. He elaborated on the responses of sheep farmers in Cumbria, who had been subjected to administrative restrictions because of radioactive contamination, allegedly caused by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986.  The sheep farmers suffered economic losses, and their resistance against the imposed regulation was being deemed irrational and inadequate.  It turned out that the source of radioactivity was actually the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing complex; thus, the experts who were responsible for the duration of the restrictions were completely mistaken. The example led to attempts to better involve local knowledge and lay-persons' experience and to assess its often highly geographically and historically defined background.
+
+=== Science studies on volcanology ===

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+title: "Science studies"
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+category: "reference"
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+---
+
+Donovan et al. (2012) used social studies of volcanology to investigate the generation of knowledge and expert advice on various active volcanoes. It contains a survey of volcanologists carried out during 2008 and 2009 and interviews with scientists in the UK, Montserrat, Italy and Iceland during fieldwork seasons. Donovan et al. (2012) asked the experts about the felt purpose of volcanology and what they considered the most important eruptions in historical time. The survey tries to identify eruptions that had an influence on volcanology as a science and to assess the role of scientists in policymaking.
+A main focus was on the impact of the Montserrat eruption 1997. The eruption, a classical example of the black swan theory directly killed (only) 19 persons. However the outbreak had major impacts on the local society and destroyed important infrastructure, as the island's airport. About 7,000 people, or two-thirds of the population, left Montserrat; 4,000 to the United Kingdom.
+The Montserrat case put immense pressure on volcanologists, as their expertise suddenly became the primary driver of various public policy approaches. The science studies approach provided valuable insights in that situation. There were various miscommunications among scientists. Matching scientific uncertainty (typical of volcanic unrest) and the request for a single unified voice for political advice was a challenge. The Montserrat Volcanologists began to use statistical elicitation models to estimate the probabilities of particular events, a rather subjective method, but allowing to synthesizing consensus and experience-based expertise step by step. It involved as well local knowledge and experience.
+Volcanology as a science currently faces a shift of its epistemological foundations of volcanology. The science started to involve more research into risk assessment and risk management. It requires new, integrated methodologies for knowledge collection that transcend scientific disciplinary boundaries but combine qualitative and quantitative outcomes in a structured whole.
+
+== Experts and democracy ==
+Science has become a major force in Western democratic societies, which depend on innovation and technology (compare Risk society) to address its risks. Beliefs about science can be very different from those of the scientists themselves, for reasons of e.g. moral values, epistemology or political motivations. The designation of expertise as authoritative in the interaction with lay people and decision makers of all kind is nevertheless challenged in contemporary risk societies, as suggested by scholars who follow Ulrich Beck's theorisation. The role of expertise in contemporary democracies is an important theme for debate among science studies scholars. Some argue for a more widely distributed, pluralist understanding of expertise (Sheila Jasanoff and Brian Wynne, for example), while others argue for a more nuanced understanding of the idea of expertise and its social functions (Collins and Evans, for example).
+
+== See also ==
+Merton thesis
+Public awareness of science
+Science and technology studies
+Science and technology studies in India
+Social construction of technology
+Sociology of scientific knowledge
+Sokal affair
+
+== References ==
+
+== Bibliography ==
+Science studies, general
+Bauchspies, W., Jennifer Croissant and Sal Restivo: Science, Technology, and Society: A Sociological Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
+Biagioli, Mario, ed. The Science Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999).
+Bloor, David; Barnes, Barry & Henry, John, Scientific knowledge: a sociological analysis (Chicago: University Press, 1996).
+Gross, Alan. Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies. Carbondale: SIU Press, 2006.
+Fuller, Steve, The Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies (New York: Routledge, 2006).
+Hess, David J. Science Studies: An Advanced Introduction (New York: NYU Press, 1997).
+Jasanoff, Sheila, ed. Handbook of science and technology studies (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications, 1995).
+Latour, Bruno, "The Last Critique," Harper's Magazine (April 2004): 15–20.
+Latour, Bruno. Science in Action. Cambridge. 1987.
+Latour, Bruno, "Do You Believe in Reality: News from the Trenches of the Science Wars," in Pandora's Hope (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)
+Vinck, Dominique. The Sociology of Scientific Work. The Fundamental Relationship between Science and Society (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2010).
+Wyer, Mary; Donna Cookmeyer; Mary Barbercheck, eds. Women, Science and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies, Routledge 200
+Haraway, Donna J. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 183–201. Originally published in Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575–599. (available online)
+Foucault, Michel, "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 109–133.
+Porter, Theodore M. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
+Restivo, Sal: "Science, Society, and Values: Toward a Sociology of Objectivity" (Lehigh PA: Lehigh University Press, 1994).
+Medicine and biology
+Dumit, Joseph (2003). Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691113982.
+Fadiman, Anne (1997). The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
+Martin, Emily (1999). "Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as Nation State". In Biagioli, Mario (ed.). The Science Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. pp. 358–71.
+Media, culture, society and technology
+Hancock, Jeff. Deception and design: the impact of communication technology on lying behavior
+Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture. Penguin USA, 2004. ISBN 1-59420-006-8
+MacKenzie, Donald. The Social Shaping of Technology Open University Press: 2nd ed. 1999.  ISBN 0-335-19913-5
+Mitchell, William J. Rethinking Media Change Thorburn and Jennings eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 2003.
+Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Penguin USA, 1985. ISBN 0-670-80454-1
+Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge: Mass., Perseus Publishing. 2002.
+
+== External links ==
+
+Sociology of Science, an introductory article by Joseph Ben-David & Teresa A. Sullivan, Annual Review of Sociology, 1975
+The Incommensurability of Scientific and Poetic Knowledge
+University of Washington Science Studies Network

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+title: "Spanish language in science and technology"
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+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
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+---
+
+The Spanish language is used in diverse areas of science and technology. Despite its large number of speakers, the Spanish language does not feature prominently in scientific writing, with the exception of the humanities. One estimate puts the percentage of Spanish language publications in natural sciences and technology as 0.5% of the world total, a low number since Spanish is often considered to rank second or third among languages in various other metrics and estimates. In the humanities, a similar estimate yields 2.81%.
+Summarizing the status of the Spanish language in the sciences, researcher Álvaro Cabezas writes: "No serious scientist publishes his best works in a language other than English".
+The creation of new Spanish terminology is more a result of translating concepts from other languages than of crafting original ideas.
+
+
+== Bibliometric studies ==
+Among Spanish-language articles indexed in Scopus from 1996 to 2011, 10.8% qualify as "Life Sciences", 13.2% as "Physical Sciences", 44.4% as "Health Sciences", 29.6% as "Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities", and 2.0% as "Multi-disciplinary & Undefined". Thus, a higher percentage of Spanish language content is published in "Health Sciences" and "Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities" than in English, Chinese, or Russian. Spanish shares this trait with Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and French.
+A bibliometric study of publications on the subject of "digital communication" indexed in Scopus and Web of Science found that in both databases, Spanish-language articles comprise around 6.5% of the content. Notably, in these databases, various authors with articles published in Spanish were based in non-Spanish speaking countries. A 2014 Google Scholar search on the words "biodiversity" and "conservation" yielded Spanish as the language with the second most entries — far behind English and just ahead of Portuguese.
+
+
+== Causes for the limited use of Spanish ==
+The Spanish language is one of many major languages with limited use in science and technology. The main cause of this is the proliferation of English in scientific writing, which has been ongoing since English displaced French and German as the languages of science in the first half of the 20th century.
+Another cause of the scant publication of articles in Spanish in scientific journals is that scientists from Spain tend to form partnerships (at least in the 21st century) more with researchers from elsewhere in Europe or the United States than with those from other Spanish-speaking countries. As with other languages, including the historically important German, writing in Spanish limits access to influential foreign journals. Spanish language journals and articles are systematically underrepresented in the ISI database, and are disadvantaged by unfavourable assessments of impact factor, a widely used metric for evaluating scientific journals.
+The scientific policy of Spain has, since the 1980s, focused on promoting the international diffusion of research from Spain, without considering which language is used.
+
+
+=== Deficient language modernization ===
+The Spanish language has not kept pace with the development of language in various fields of knowledge. Writing in 2007, Daniel Prado noted that Google searches for Spanish terms do not often yield quality results, hampering the work of translators and editors.
+Scholar Enrique Alarcón explains the case of engineering, where he posits three causes of the poor quality of Spanish used in the subject - words that exist but are unknown, confusion between similar but not identical concepts, and a lack of precision in terminology. The poor state of the Spanish language used in engineering may stem from a mishmash of engineering traditions and the impossibility for individuals to have a classical education across multiple branches of engineering. Alternatively, the poor state of the language in engineering may derive from the lack of a previous tradition in certain subjects.
+By 2007, the Icelandic, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish languages had ten to twenty times as much financial resource invested in language care and improvement as Spanish, despite the small size of the communities and economies of their respective countries.
+
+
+== Proposed reasons to promote Spanish ==
+Scholar Rainer Enrique Hamel points to three arguments to promote the use of Spanish in science:
+
+Language diversity in science is good for reasons akin to why ecological diversity is good.
+Excessive use of English reinforces undesirable asymmetric relations in science.
+Scholars from anglophone countries are adopting bad practices, such as not reading research in languages other than English, reinforcing an unjustified privileged situation.
+"Practitioners and policy makers" may not benefit from the addition of new scientific information if it is not in a language they understand. An example of this is protected area directors in Spain who self-report having language barrier difficulties with publications relevant to carrying out their work.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Academic imperialism
+Spanish-language journals
+
+
+== Notes ==
+
+
+== References ==

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-date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:34:22.862395+00:00"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:06.310269+00:00"
 instance: "kb-cron"
 ---
 

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_esotericism_and_science-5.md

@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 6/6
 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_esotericism_and_science"
 category: "reference"
 tags: "science, encyclopedia"
-date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:34:22.862395+00:00"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:06.310269+00:00"
 instance: "kb-cron"
 ---
 

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuasa_Phenomenon-0.md

@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1
 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuasa_Phenomenon"
 category: "reference"
 tags: "science, encyclopedia"
-date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:43:03.834238+00:00"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:07.606078+00:00"
 instance: "kb-cron"
 ---