Olga Amsterdamska

Citations: indicators of significance?

What makes a scientific article significant? This paper-part of a larger study which will examine how various kinds of significance can be related to one another in a coherent theoretical framework-focusses on the processes by which new knowledge claims are being integrated into the cognitive structure when they are cited in other papers. Citations appear both as “threads” linking the citing papers to the existing literature in the field, and as elements fulfilling specific functions within the arguments made in these papers. We have found that (1) it is misleading to equate every article with a single knowledge claim, let alone with an attempt to construct “a fact”; (2) even when the same “sentence” is cited repeatedly, it can be put to quite different uses in the citing papers; and (3) the process of codification of scientific knowledge through the use of references appears to be far more complex and multi-dimensional than citation context analyses focussing on the use and the gradual disappearance of modalities would lead us to believe. Some consequences for the use use of citation analysis to reconstruct cognitive structures will be discussed.

Book Review : Surely You Are Joking, Monsieur Latour!Science in Action, by Bruno Latour. Milton Keynes: Open University Press: 1987, 274 pp.

In reviewing his book, if I were to adopt Bruno Latour’s ideas about science, I would certainly ignore its contents and avoid interpreting it. Instead, I would have to consider what he does in order to &dquo;weaken [his] enemies, paralyse those [he] cannot weaken, help [his] allies if they are attacked, ensure safe communications with those who supply [him] with indisputable instruments, oblige [his] enemies to fight one another&dquo; (p. 37). To write a science in action review of Science in Action would mean that instead of asking what this book teaches us about science, about the production of scientific knowledge, or about the organization of the scientific community, I would have to examine how this book is being used by others. I would have to assume that until it is read, it does not even exist and that the issue of whether it is correct or not depends entirely on how it is read. Reviewing Latour’s book in his own terms would

25.00. Also available in paper from Harvard University Press,

On August 21, 1980, the eighth day of the strikes in Gdansk shipyard, Bronislaw Geremek, a medieval historian, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the editor of the Catholic periodical Wieź, both members of the unofficial “flying” university (TKN), arrived in the shipyard to give to the strikers a letter of support signed by 64 Warsaw intellectuals (1). They met with Lech Walesa, who not only thanked them for transmitting the letter, but also asked for more direct help from the intellectuals. Geremek and Mazowiecki, together with several other intellectuals who arrived in the shipyard during the following days (2), were then nominated as “experts” by the Interfactory Strike Committee in Gdansk (MKS) and asked to help in making sure that “‘they’ (i.e., the government) will not cheat us” (3). Experts were also needed to draft appropriate documents and to prepare for negotiations. During the following sixteen months of “Solidarity’s” above-ground existence, the partnership between the worker-activists and intellectuals was one of the permanent features of Poland’s “self-limiting revolution.”

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This article compares the manner in which the image of bacteriology was being created and reproduced during the first half of the twentieth century in two different types of popular discourse: in the descriptions of progress and utility of bacteriology published in Scientific American and in the presidential speeches to the Society of American Bacteriologists. The observed differences are explained in terms of the growing distance between the professional and the popular discourses on science and the attempts of bacteriologists to create a common professional identity around the concept of “fundamental bacteriology.”;

Intellectuals in Social Movements: The Experts of “Solidarity”

While sociologists of science generally agree that some form of exchange of recognition for contributions plays a central role in the organization of scientific work and fuels the quest of scientists for innovations, there is no general agreement on the manner in which the value of contributions is assessed collegially, on the strategies chosen by scientists to accumulate rewards (or credibility or credit), or on the uses to which reputations might be put.

Inventing Utility: Public and Professional Presentations of Bacteriology before Second World War

We began our discussion of the emergence of linguistics with the question of how to account for the fact that during most of the nineteenth century, linguistics was a German discipline. The argument that Romantic concepts and ideas were profoundly embedded in the idea system of the early comparative grammarians might explain why German scholars took particular interest in the links between Sanskrit and the European languages, but it hardly explains why comparative studies of language became a subject of lasting interest in the German universities. After all, long after Romanticism had ceased to exercise any direct influence on intellectual life in Germany, comparative and historical linguistics was still a growing field of research.

The Neogrammarian Revolution From Above

Throughout the nineteenth century, comparative and historical linguistics remained very much a German discipline. Although it is impossible to disregard the contributions made by scholars of other nationalities (for example by Rasmus Rask, the Danish precursor of Grimm, or by later linguists such as G.I. Ascoli in Italy or Michel Breal in France), their achievements appear isolated and scattered when compared to the steady and cumulative work of the German comparative grammarians. German linguists laid the foundations for the new discipline, and their comparative and historical grammars, dictionaries, and compendia dominated it throughout the nineteenth century. What accounts for this continuing advantage of German linguistics?

Linguistics at the German University

The transition from historical to structuralist linguistics which took place in the first decades of the twentieth century is commonly regarded as a major transformation in linguistic theory and research. It has been described as a revolution in the science of language and its significance for the development of twentieth-century linguistics cannot be denied.1 Accordingly, a vocabulary of radical discontinuity has characterized many discussions of the “gap” between nineteenth-century historical studies of language change and twentieth-century structural analyses of language states. Ferdinand de Saussure’s lectures on general linguistics, published posthumously as the Cours de linguistique generale (1916), have been described as “the start of a new era in the science of language” and as a “revolutionary act of providing a new frame of reference in general linguistics.”2 This perception of incommensurability has been tempered only by a wide-ranging search for some appropriate ancestors of structural linguistics: for scholars who anticipated one or more ideas of the new system, or who could have served as an inspiration to Saussure, the recognized “father” of structural linguistics.3

The Idea System of the Early Comparative Grammarians

Saussure’s formulation of the study of synchronic linguistics completely redirected the substantive interests of linguists. It also brought about profound changes of a philosophical, theoretical, and methodological nature. Saussure introduced a new relativistic and “constructivist” notion of a linguistic fact. He redefined language, making it an appropriate object for a strictly linguistic synchronic study. He suggested a new form of structural explanation of linguistic states that was neither causal nor historical. Saussure’s revolution was wide-ranging and radical, affecting major aspects of the idea system of linguistics.

Saussure’s Revolution From Within

In 1878, two young German linguists, Karl Brugmann and Hermann Osthoff, published the first volume of a series entitled Morphologische Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiete der Indogermanischen Sprachen. The “Preface” to this volume is generally regarded as a manifesto of the then new school of linguistics, the Neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker). Osthoff and Brugmann decried “the fundamental errors which dominated the entire older liguistics;”1 and they insisted that “only that comparative linguist who for once emerges from the hypotheses-beclouded atmosphere of the workshop in which the original Indo-European forms are forced, and steps into the clear air of tangible reality… can arrive at a correct idea of the way in which linguistic forms live and change…”2 According to Osthoff and Brugmann, this new beginning in linguistics received its initial impulse from the work of Wilhelm Scherer and August Leskien, and was carried on in their own work and that of other young linguists to whom they refer collectively as the Neogrammarian Movement (die junggrammatische Richtung). The “Preface”, which also formulates “the most important principles of the neogrammarian movement,”3 was followed by several other more extended statements of Neogrammarian principles, especially Hermann Paul’s Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1880) and Berthold Delbruck’s Einleitung in das Sprachstudium (1880).4