h/t Michael Garfield – who talks about this as ‘complexity as a platform’ rather than a discipline
Complexity Sciences | Science & Technology Studies

Complexity Sciences

A Scientific Platform

Authors

Fabrizio Li VigniLISIS, UGE https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5763-7446

DOI: https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.97027

Abstract

Social scientists have proposed several concepts to give account of the way scientific life organizes. By studying “complexity sciences” – established in the mid-1980s by the “Santa Fe Institute” in New Mexico (USA) –, the present article addresses to interdisciplinary studies and emergent domains literature by proposing a new concept to describe this domain. Drawing from Bourdieusian sociology of science and STS, a “scientific platform” is defined as a meeting point between different specialties, which, on the basis of a flexible common ground, pursue together shared or parallel socio-epistemic objectives. Most of the specialties inscribed in complexity suffer from a relative marginality in their disciplinary field. The term “platform” refers to what the heterogeneous members of the collective mutualize, both in cognitive and social terms, in order to exist and expand.

Vol. 34 No. 4 (2021): Science & Technology Studies