Abstract
The main proposal of this paper is that boundary objects and the trading zones in which they occur are the analogue of pheromone trails in the foraging of a termite colony. The colony can be construed as a stigmergic system where the traces of the actions of individual termites coordinate their further actions without the existence of any central control or planning structures. The coordinated systems approach proposed by this paper lends support to the idea that such a system is minimally cognitive in the sense that it is responsible for goal-directed behaviour. Boundary objects and trading zones in scientific practice play a similar functional role to pheromone traces because they are responsible for the same kind of coordination. This approach therefore provides a cognitive account of the social notions of boundary object and trading zone without making representationalist or computationalist assumptions. Moreover, it is scale-invariant—the same analytical technique can be applied at multiple scales simultaneously. It therefore provides a framework for an understanding of the complementarity of cognitive and social approaches to scientific investigation and points to areas for further ethnographic research.
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Notes
“Die Teleologie ist eine Dame, ohne die kein Biologe leben kann. Er scheut sich jedoch, sich mit ihr in der Öffentlichkeit zu zeigen”.
In two articles under review I discuss attunement, roles and show how role distribution itself may also be coordinated through environmental variables.
I use ‘processing’ as a metaphor – this account is not committed to a standard information processing reading of complexity.
I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that a pidgin may also be thought of as coordinating actions without reference to its traditional linguistic role.
As an afterthought here, keeping in mind the idea of the relation between a specimen and its ideal type, perhaps the insights of Star and Griesemer (and Bowker and Star) should be modified to include the possibility that there are boundary relations, that play the same kind of role as boundary objects (Bowker and Star, 1999; Star and Griesemer, 1989). This is supported by the fact that many examples of stigmergic trace variables in the wild are actually relational (see Sims and Yilmaz, 2023).
The work of Joseph Henrich suggests that falsehoods make rather good coordinators too! (2016).
My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
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The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped make this a much better paper.
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Sims, R. Boundary objects, trading zones, and stigmergy: the social and the cognitive in science. Synthese 202, 117 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04340-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04340-x