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The second wave of theorists to study scientific communities effectively denied the unity of an overarching scientific community, adopting instead an analytic framework based in incommensurability. Thomas Kuhn popularized such analyses of scientific communities, suggesting that scientific communities are only capable of communicating with and understanding others within the same community and by extension, the same paradigm; cross-community discussions could only lead to misunderstandings. Kuhn’s interpretation of scientific communities – indeed, of science more generally – was highly influenced by Ludwig Fleck who, in the 1930s, proposed the notion of a ''thought collective'' acting according to a shared ''thought style''.[[CiteRef::Fleck (1979)]] A thought collective is a group that shares a thought style, through which Fleck held that scientific facts are socially constructed. For both Kuhn and Fleck, scientific communities emerged from such specific contexts that they developed a way of thinking only shared by those in the same context and community.
The third wave of theories about scientific communities arose out of the realization that scientific communities could be divided into such small units of analysis that the concept of scientific community would become nearly meaningless. Theoreticians of the third wave either regarded scientific community as a mere metaphor or accepted that only highly localized, micro scientific communities existed. In the former case, sociologists like Karin Knorr-Cetina argued that scientific communities did not actually exist, rather they were “taxonomic collectives” or theoretical constructs imposed onto a group that did not recognize itself as such.[[CiteRef::Knorr-Cetina (1982)]] In the latter case, sociologists like Peter Galison did not deny the existence of scientific communities, but acknowledged that meaningful scientific practice arose only out of collaboration and competition between micro-communities (Galison).
|History=There have been many attempts by scientonomists to define the term, and two are of note: the ''Fraser-Walpole Model'' and the ''Supradium Model''. Though these models were proposed in the early history of our discipline – prior to the development of a system of proposed modifications to the theory of scientific change – they are worth discussing as early attempts at defining a scientific community as something other than the bearer of a mosaic. As it turns out, both the Fraser-Walpole and Supradium models are deficient because they emphasize neither the necessary nor sufficient characteristics of a community.
