theorywatch

So I’m reading The Chaos of Disciplines by Andrew Abbott, whose The System of Professions I absolutely adored, and I’m a little taken aback not to be liking it better. Abbott still writes like an archangel, but I can’t believe that he give more than a passing nod to the role of scholarly citations as evidence in how disciplines evolve (whether as fractals, or factions, or figments of his imagination, doesn’t matter). He is focusing on the social sciences, not the “hard” sciences, but still the omission makes me think that he didn’t do that much of a literature review on how his ideas might be examined empirically before deciding to emphasize “chaos.” Even I could suggest some useful studies that have used citation analysis to explore the “fractal structure” of a few fields.

That’s rather disconcerting: I was expecting to love this book and to be able to use it in my own work.