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{{Definitional Topic

|Question=What is '''scientific community'''? Can it be defined as more than simply “the bearer of a mosaic”?

|Formulated Year=2015

|Prehistory=Scientific communities have been defined and identified variously by historians, philosophers and sociologists of science. In what follows, three waves of interpretations of scientific communities will be presented. It should be emphasized that these waves are not indicative of all attempts at defining scientific communities.

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.

|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.

The failure of the Supradium Model was that it never consistently defined the notion of a scientific community using necessary and sufficient characteristics. An interest community was, in essence, a redefinition of the community as “bearer of a mosaic” in the sense that any interest community simply shares a set of theories and methods. Proposing interest communities offered nothing new to scientonomy. Network communities seemed important – indeed, they remain important for understanding the social elements of science – but lacked a formulation that could be incorporated into ''The Laws of Scientific Change''. They were deemed an unnecessary, but possible feature of a scientific community, to be explored – pursued, if you will – in some other way. Lastly, we had institutional communities. Institutional communities seemed the most feasible direction for defining a scientific community given ''The Laws''’ adaptation to changing historical contexts because institutional communities truly recognized themselves as communities, rather than being arbitrary characteristics imposed onto a historical case study by a researcher.

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