On Discipline Building: The Paradoxes of George Sarton

THE PROCESSES BY WHICH KNOWLEDGE is institutionalized have yet to be explored in any systematic way. It is easier to sense than to articulate those characteristic changes in cognitive structure and social function which any field of learning undergoes as its legitimacy is established. Yet certain features may be delineated. The most obvious is the set of shifts that a field of learning experiences as it changes from being a diffuse, unfocused area of inquiry, at best tangential to the true intellectual concerns of its occasional votaries, to being a conceptually discrete discipline, able to command its own tools, techniques, methodologies, intellectual orientations, and problematics. This creation of a cognitive identity is only one facet of the institutionalization of a field of learning. A parallel set of shifts, which most often occurs at a later period in time, revolves around the creation of a professional identity for the new enterprise. This latter set of shifts has normally provided the focus for discussions of the professionalization of science.3 However, the creation of a professional identity is only one part of the process by which a discipline or group of disciplines are institutionalized.