This essay attempts to show the decisive importance of the “scientific discipline” for any historical or sociological analysis of modern science. There are two reasons for this:

1. A discontinuity can be observed at the beginning of modern science: the “discipline,” which up until that time had been a classificatorily generated unit of the ordering of knowledge for purposes of instruction in schools and universities, develops into a genuine and concrete social system of scientific communication. Scientific disciplines as concrete systems (Realsysteme) arise as a result of (a) the communicative stabilization of “scientific communities” at the end of the eighteenth century and the formation of “appropriate” roles and organizational structures (in universities); (b) the structural differentiation of the new scientific disciplines from the established professions (law, theology, medicine) in Europe; (c) the formation of scientific communication in the standardized form of scientific publication; the distinction of the separate action-type “scientific research” and the differentiation of these two elementary acts of all future scientific endeavor in relation to each other.

2. The scientific discipline as primary unit of the internal differentiation of science has, since its genesis, been stabilized by two conditions: (a) The fact of a science differentiated into a plurality of (competing, mutually stimulating) disciplinary perspectives becomes the chief causal factor underlying the developmental dynamism of modern science; (b) Similar to the way in which the discipline functions as a cognitive address within the system of science, science also links the discipline up as a structural unit (utilized in both systems) with curricular structures in the system of education — i.e., it is stabilized by the central system/environment relation of science.

In the controversy in 1989 over the reported achievement of cold nuclear fusion, parts of the physics and chemistry communities were opposed in both a theoretic and a professional competition. Physicists saw the chemists' announcement as an incursion into territory allocated to their own discipline and strove to restore the interdisciplinary boundaries that had previously held. The events that followed throw light on the manner in which scientists' knowledge claims and metascientific beliefs are affected by their membership of disciplinary communities. In particular, the controversy offers evidence for a constructivist reinterpretation of the “division of nature into levels,” which is customarily held to underpin the division of science into disciplines.

Kuhnian phases of paradigmatic development correspond to characteristic variations of citation measures. These correlations can in turn be predicted from a simple model of human information processing when applied to the common environments of scientists. By combining a scientometric and a human information processing approach to the history of scientific thought, structures of disciplinary development, and in particular paradigmatic cycles, can be more reliably assessed than before. Consequently, the quantitative historian of science is liberated to some extent from the vagaries of qualitative judgment, as exemplified by traditional narrative type approaches to the history of science.

The Doctor of Philosophy, a nonmedieval academic figure who spread throughout the globe in the Modern Era, and who emblemized the transformation of academic knowledge into the “pursuit of research,” emerged through a long and tortuous path in the early modern Germanies. The emergence and recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy would be correlative with the nineteenth-century professionalization of the arts and sciences. Throughout the Early Modern Era, the earlier Doctors and older “professional” faculties from the medieval university — Theology, Law, and Medicine — opposed recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy. In Saxony, the forces of “medievalism” were able to block recognition of the Doctor of Philosophy, and they retained the degraded Master of Arts or Philosophy as the highest degree in arts and sciences. Forces of “modernism” prevailed, however, in Austria and Prussia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Austria, the Doctor of Philosophy arrived as a wholly modern figure, the creation of a nice dossier and a civil service examination: the medieval “juridical” persona became a modern “bureaucratic” persona. Between this bureaucratic modernism of the Austrians and corporatist medievalism of the Saxons, the Prussians pursued a via media. Unlike the Saxons, they recognized the Doctor of Philosophy; but unlike the Austrians, they did not completely bureaucratize the candidate's persona. The Prussians demanded from the candidate a “work of research,” a doctoral dissertation, which exhibited the aesthetic qualities of the Romantic artist: originality and personality.

In this paper it will be shown that Newton's Principia gives an explication of and an argument for the first Law of Motion, that seems to be outside the scope of today's philosophy of science but was familiar to seventeenth-century commentators: The foundation of classical mechanics is possible only by recurrence to results of a successful technical practice. Laws of classical mechanics gain their meaning as well as their claims to validity only when considered as statements about artifacts whose production belongs to the shared know-how of a scientific community.

Many find it “notoriously difficult to see how societal context can affect in any essential way how someone solves a mathematical problem or makes a measurement.” That may be because it has been a habit of western scientists to assert their numerical schemes were untainted by any hint of anthropomorphism. Nevertheless, that Platonist penchant has always encountered obstacles in practice, primarily because the stability of any applied numerical scheme requires some alien or external warrant.

This paper surveys the history of measurement standards, physical dimensions and dimensionless constants as one instance of the quest to purge all anthropomorphic taint first in the metric system, then in the dimensions provided by the atom, then in physical constants intelligible to extraterrestrials, only then to end up back at overt anthropomorphism in the late 20th century. This suggests that the “naturalness” of natural numbers has always been conceptualized in locally contingent cultural terms.