Science as a Self-Organizing Meta-Information System

not a subject, a communication doesn’t produce communications, only human beings produce communications that cause reactions and the further production of communications by other human beings. Hence the assumption of a duality between structure and action seems to be a necessary condition for adequately describing self-referential, circular causal, reflexive processes in a social system.

Also concerning science as a system, the same shortcomings can be found in Luhmann’s theory. Science is not a system where communicative truth produces communicative truths because only human actors can scientifically communicate and decide individually and collectively what should be considered as true and false. So what is missing is the assumption that scientific structures are both medium and outcome of scientific actions by individual and collective scientific actors. As an alternative I suggest to argue that social self-organization should be viewed as the mutual production of actors and structures, social structures produce man as a social being just like man produces social structures as a necessary condition for his/her social being, the human being is creator and created result of society. As I will try to show this idea can also be applied to science as a system.

Luhmann’s theory of science is structuralistic (structure problem), internalistic (causality problem), and synchronous (problem of dynamics). It is a one-sided theory that can’t explain the important of human actors in science, external influences, and diachronic change.

Krohn and Küppers (1990) argue that there is a difference between science and research: “Research is the production of knowledge, science is concerned with the creation of conditions favorable to the continuation of research”. I don’t think that such a dualism makes much sense because one can distinguish different practices of scientists, but both activities that Krohn and Küppers mention take place in one and the same system. Hence I suggest that science is a system of organized and systematic knowledge production, whereas research is the basic practice of human actors in this system and can be subdivided into different research practices. Science is a systemic term, research is a term that focuses on processes and practices within the scientific system.

Other than Luhmann, Krohn and Küppers (1989, 1990) give attention to the importance of human actors in scientific self-organization and stress the importance of research groups as actors. They distinguish three different types of activities of such groups: integrative activities (self-maintenance of the group by constituting beliefs, attitudes and intention), research activities (production of knowledge), and scientific activities (marketing of research results, acquiring new research tasks). Research would be possible as recursive interactions between researchers in a research group, each researcher would produce information as an output that functions as informational input for other researchers in his group (1989: 28ff). The selforganization of research is considered as a recursive process between theory and method, i.e. theoretical and observational activities, that produces new knowledge (Krohn/Küppers 1989: 46-65, 1990: 213f). The observational part is itself considered as a recursive loop that connects experimental design (construction) and the observation of effects (data) based on the binary code successful/failure. The theoretical part is considered as a recursive loop that connects the derivation of expectation (hypotheses) with the interpretation of data (information) based on the binary code true/false. Theory would be connected to method by the process of operationalization, method to theory by the process of explanation.

Science (Wissenschaft) would be the environment of research, it would have scientific, nonscientific, and hybrid aspects (1989: 66ff). Krohn and Küppers (1989: 66-121, 1990: 215ff) argue that there are six environments of research that together form the scientific system 5