(Re-)Problematizing the Luhmannian constructivist systems approach: A Bungean intervention
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the field of sociological theory, after the decline of Parsons’ version of structural functionalism, Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory came to be seen as the major representative of systems thinking. While Luhmann’s autopoietic systems ontology is sophisticated and deserves serious consideration, the author argues that the prevailing identification of Luhmann’s constructivist-oriented approach with the systems approach itself is problematic mainly for two reasons. First, as the works of the Argentinian-Canadian systems theorist Mario Bunge demonstrate, the systems approach can be fruitfully based on (some version of) scientific realism. Second, the adherents to Luhmann’s constructivist epistemology in sociology seldom engage in a detailed examination of the various critiques of anti-realism offered by scientific and critical realists. Drawing on the literature on philosophy of science, especially the writings of Bunge and a few leading critical realists, the author suggests that a serious Luhmannian sociologist is obligated to provide more cogent and detailed discussions on philosophy of (social) science before taking an opinionated position on epistemology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it