Conceptual Displacement and Migration in Science: A Prefatory Paper

In the last few years there has been growing agreement among sociologists studying the scientific community that one of their central aims should be to describe systematically the connections between social processes and intellectual development in science.' This concern on the part of sociologists with scientific knowledge is very recent, however, and most of the studies at present available deal exclusively with such social aspects of science as the system of professional rewards, the patterns of communication among research scientists, and the nature of social control within the research community.2 Unlike the sociologists, certain philosophers and historians of science have been eager to examine the nature of scientific knowledge and to pose the question: How do new ideas emerge in science ? But in their answers they have concentrated on the way in which scientific innovations have their origins in prior ideas and have paid little attention to the accompanying social processes.3 Thus both these approaches to the study of scientific development are incomplete. In this paper I shall try, in a very preliminary way, to indicate how we can begin to build a bridge between them. I shall do this by taking one conception from each perspective and by showing how these conceptions can be combined in the analysis of certain kinds of events in science. From