Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 09 – 20
Modern science is divided into increasingly specialized fields. A scientist may spend decades acquiring intimate knowledge of a relatively narrow area while knowing little more than an educated outsider about many others. This is not necessarily a defect. Specialization is one of the conditions that makes the accumulation of detailed scientific knowledge possible. But it creates a difficulty for anyone who wishes to speak about science as a whole.
The situation may be compared to a mountainous landscape divided by high ridges and deep valleys. Someone living and working in one valley may know its terrain extraordinarily well while having only indirect knowledge of what lies beyond the surrounding ridges. The limitation applies to scientists themselves. Expertise in one scientific field does not confer expertise in all the others.
It applies equally to philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science. Popper, Kuhn, Fleck, Merton, Bourdieu, Latour, and others have identified important features of scientific activity: hypothesis testing, paradigms, thought collectives, institutional norms, scientific fields, struggles for authority, laboratory practices, instruments, and networks. The question is not simply whether such phenomena exist. It is how far observations made in particular scientific settings may legitimately be extended to science as such.
This is a special case of the problem of extrapolation. Evidence obtained within one domain does not automatically retain its evidential force when transferred to another. A phenomenon may be demonstrated repeatedly and convincingly within one scientific environment without thereby being shown to have the same prevalence, importance, or explanatory role in another.
Scientific specialization makes this problem particularly difficult. Those who possess the deepest practical knowledge of particular sciences necessarily know only a portion of science, while those who formulate the broadest theories about science must speak about many scientific practices they have never themselves practised. The broader the claim about science, the greater the number of disciplinary ridges it must cross.
This does not make a general philosophy, history, or sociology of science impossible. Nor does it mean that only practitioners are entitled to study scientific activity. An outsider may notice structures that practitioners overlook, just as someone standing on a ridge may perceive relationships between valleys that are invisible from below. Distance can reveal patterns as well as conceal details.
But neither local expertise nor panoramic vision abolishes the problem of extrapolation. The inhabitant of one valley should not assume that neighbouring valleys have the same terrain. The observer on the ridge should not infer from the valleys that are visible that those beyond the horizon are structured in the same way.
General propositions about science therefore require more than convincing observations of particular sciences. They require justification for the transfer of those observations across scientific domains. A pattern identified in physics, sociology, genetics, laboratory organization, or the history of particular disciplines may indeed prove to be widespread. Its range, however, is something to be established, not contained in the original observation.
Different philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science may consequently identify genuine features of scientific activity while exaggerating their jurisdiction. What is characteristic of one valley may occur in another, play a different role there, or scarcely occur at all. The specialization of science therefore imposes a corresponding obligation on anyone who speaks about science in the singular. Before carrying a conclusion across the ridge, we should ask whether the evidence that supported it on this side still supports it on the other.
Seen in this way, Popper, Fleck, Kuhn, Merton, Bourdieu, Latour, and other students of science need not be treated as competitors for possession of the single correct picture of science. Each may have identified pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle: the logic of testing, historically inherited ways of seeing, paradigms and scientific communities, institutional norms and incentives, struggles over authority, laboratory practices, instruments, and networks. Some pieces may fit together; others may require modification, and some may eventually prove to have been put in the wrong place. They can complement one another without forming a complete picture. We have many pieces of the puzzle of science. We should not mistake any one of them—or even the picture we can presently assemble from them—for the completed puzzle.
See also:
Excursus 031 – On Extrapolation
Excursus 064 – On Viewing the Same Problem from Different Perspectives
