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The description of science as a socially mediated work process yielding scientific products which are themselves dermed by the social processes of their generation is gaining broader currency (1). Such a description asserts that scientific products are indeed social relations of the system of scientific production, and hence should be understood as embodying and, at times, concretizing the nature, the potentialities and contradictions of the system of scientific production and reproduction in which they are embedded. The task of the sociologist of science is thus, in part, to investigate the nature and context of scientific products in order to assess what these products as social relations may reveal about the larger productive system, the larger work process, which permitted their definition and formulation. In this paper I shall attempt to articulate in a preliminary way some of the features of a system of social relations of scientific production as they are implied by the nature of a specific group of scientific products to which the terms 'closed' and 'arithmomorphic' have been applied in recent descriptions (2).

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-1186-0_5

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