The Epistemology of Cross-National Research in

Technoscience Studies:
A Computational Approach to Contextualization of Concepts

Arash Moussavi
3rd Year DPhil in Science & Technology Policy
Sharif – Sussex Joint Programme1
October 2008

Supervised by Dr Ali Kermanshah

The School of Management & Economics
Sharif University of Technology

With Special Thanks to Professor Erik Millstone and Dr. Justine Johnstone
both from SPRU, The University of Sussex,
for their Advice and Contributions

Abstract
Theoretical concepts that have been developed in science, technology, and innovation studies are
increasingly utilized by scholars in investigations across international borders within various
institutional and socio-economic configurations. While not totally insensitive to the necessities of
context, these cross-national investigations are not founded on an articulated and conscious
epistemology of contextualization of concepts. The current research project is aimed to contribute
to elaboration of such an epistemology. A naturalistic computational approach to conceptual
change is used in the project for developing a normative package of heuristics for contextual
adaptation of social concepts. As an exemplar, the concept of national innovation system is
analyzed throughout the project to provide descriptive support and assessment criteria for the
soundness of the developed framework.

1
The dissertation will be funded by Iran‟s National Research Institute for Science Policy (NRISP)
Introduction
Scholars from all around the world try nowadays to achieve better understandings about
the dynamics of various sorts of knowledge systems performing within various socio-
cultural and institutional environments. Meanwhile, academic investigations, particularly
those that are undertaken in peripheral areas, increasingly utilize the terminology and
conceptual frameworks that have been rooted primarily in socio-economic settings very
different from those upon which these investigations are focused. Within the policy
arena, there can be identified a progressive international flow of all sorts of things that
Dolowitz and Marsh once defined as the content of policy transfer, i.e., policy goals,
policy instruments or administrative techniques, institutions, ideologies, ideas, attitudes
and concepts, and negative lessons (Dolowitz & Marsh, 1996). The trend is reinforced in
specific cases and programs by active participation of supra-national institutions like UN
and World Bank.
In practice, cross-national applications of intellectual constructs and policy tools are not
in all cases indifferent to the necessities of context. Nonetheless, conscious thinking on
the need for a clear „logic of contextualization‟ is sparse.
The proposed project aims to examine some initial steps towards articulation of a logical
framework for the process of cross-cultural conceptual adaptation. Even though being
genuinely a philosophical inquiry, the research does not extract its results from a priori
reflections. Relying on „normative naturalism‟ as its underlying epistemological
framework, the project is conducted in close proximity to the actual practice of
researchers in science, technology, and innovation studies. As an exemplar, the concept
of „National Innovation System‟ is analyzed profoundly in the course of the investigation
to provide empirical and descriptive ground for the further prescriptive propositions.
Within the broader paradigm of naturalism, the project takes advantage of the tools and
insights provided by a particular approach, the computational approach to conceptual
change, to conduct in-depth analyses on the nature and structure of concepts and on
mechanisms through which concepts should become contextualized in cross-national
social research.
Introducing some philosophical rigor into science, technology, and innovation studies,
the project contributes to the field to rest on a more fine-grained epistemological

2
foundation regarding its cross-national enquiries. To the growing global interest,
particularly in developing areas, in the conceptual apparatus of the field, the project
submits a useful normative framework within which this growth and expansion could be
accompanied by methodological caution and clarity. This study also contributes generally
to the field of philosophy of social sciences and one of its most challenging issues i.e.,
contextualization of social concepts, by bringing the potentials of naturalized
epistemology and computational philosophy onto the scene.

Theoretical Background
Science, technology, and innovation (STI) studies is developing increasingly into a global
enterprise. Nowadays, theoretical constructs and the conceptual frameworks of the
discipline inform policy makers all over the world including those of countries at very
different stages of economic development and societies with different social and cultural
settings. The intellectual products of the field also inspire and guide analytical efforts of
academicians from all around the globe who aim to understand and explain the
performance of knowledge systems within their own societies (see Fagerberg, 2004,
Fagerberg & Verspagen, 2006, Cozzens et al., 2008).
Accompanying this process of rapid internationalization of the discipline is a set of
methodological/epistemological concerns bearing on the degree to which the theoretical
constructs of the field could be regarded as universally applicable. There are complains,
for example, about uncritical, straightforward, and frequent use of stereotypical concepts
and standard tools drawn upon „developed country experience‟ to the context of less
developed countries (Winter, 1987, Bell, 1991, Freeman, 1992, 1994, Viotti, 2002, Rip,
2006). Scholars also criticize „ideal models‟ of STI policy which are often used in an
undifferentiated manner for all kinds of regions including central, peripheral, and old
industrial areas (Todtling & Trippl, 2005). Concerns of this sort highlight an important
question regarding the legitimate ways through which the conceptual apparatus of the
field should be applied and adapted to different social contexts.

3
The problem, even though emphasized rather frequently in the STI literature, has not
received a second-order and philosophically-informed treatment yet. Typical responses to
the challenge have been to introduce ad hoc taxonomies of different contexts, such as
developed vs. developing, and consequently to provide differentiated models or strategies
for each context. The proposed project aims to contribute to redressing the gap by
applying an epistemological approach to the problem. An epistemological and second-
order approach to the issue can integrate and generalize various instances of
contextualization process unifying them into an abstract and analyzable structure. This
process of logical reconstruction represents the process by a new symbolic language
which allows for a comprehensive analysis on the correct and incorrect aspects of the
process and on its underlying assumptions. While remaining in constant dialogue with,
and grounded in, existing practice in STI studies, the project, therefore, goes beyond that
practice to meet the necessities of a genuinely philosophical investigation.
The challenge of contextualization of theoretical concepts, even though new to STI
literature, can be tracked as part of lively debates in the philosophy of social sciences and
in some self-reflections by social scientists themselves1. Across the multicolored
spectrum of different opinions and positions on the issue, two polar extremes can be
identified. On the one end, there is a universalist approach which is traditionally
grounded in the assumption that universal characteristics can be identified in social
phenomena, independently from a particular context (See: Hantrais, 1999). From this
point of view, theoretical constructs in social sciences are context-free and legitimate
social theories are those theories that are „landless‟ (Rose, 1991, p. 446). At the other
extreme, there is a culturalist approach which denies the very possibility of any universal
generalization in social science. In this view, all social concepts are local concepts which
are necessarily historical, culturally specific, and unique (Little, 1992).
The debate between universalists and culturalists emerges from their distinctive
ontological views on the social reality. Universalists believe in the existence of social
kinds. A social kind is a set of social entities which share a common causal structure and
whose behavior can therefore be predicted on the basis of the laws that govern the

1
These self-reflections particularly have found a considerable momentum within the field of „comparative
politics‟ (for a review of the latest developments see Hall, 2003).

4
behavior of such entities1 (Little, 1992). Universalists normally view the credentials of
their discipline as depending on the existence and identification of such social kinds and
on the strength of the law-like generalizations and regularities that govern the behavior of
those kinds. Culturalists, in contrast, deny the existence of social kinds and believe that
generalizations have nothing at all to do with social sciences. They consider all social
knowledge as being local and context-specific knowledge.
Between these two contrasting viewpoints, there can be identified an intermediate
position which has been formulated in a variety of ways2. These intermediate approaches
normally emphasize in a general manner on the importance of both universal and local
aspects of social phenomena and theoretical concepts that are aimed to represent them.
Rarely, they have tried though to develop a clear normative framework that can be used
as an epistemological basis for cross-national application of theoretical concepts in social
science (Hantrais, 1999). Developing such a framework is the main objective of the
current project.
The starting point of the project is one of those intermediate positions between
universalism and culturalism. This is Giovanni Sartori‟s methodological proposal for
relating universals to particulars, a framework which is called by himself the „ladder of
abstraction‟ (Sartori, 1970, 1984, 1991, Sartori et al., 1975). Within a cross-national
research, Sartori suggests, a typical concept should move along a cognitive ladder whose
basic rule of transformation is that „the connotation (intension) and denotation
(extension) of concepts are inversely related‟ (Sartori, 1991). Moving upward the ladder,
the concept looses some of its characteristics or properties to become more general and
consequently more capable of cross-national application. Conversely, in the downward
direction, the concept obtains more characteristics or properties to become more specific
and contextually adequate. The main purpose, here in this project, is to develop Sartori‟s
model into a more philosophically-informed and more rigorous epistemology for
conceptual contextualization.

1
Examples of social kinds include riot, revolution, market economy, or religion.
2
David Collier and his colleagues in a number of publications (for example: 1993, 1997, 2001) have
provided critical categorizations of the various strategies of conceptual contextualization which are
prevalent in the works of contemporary social scientists. These different strategies reveal the actual
manifestations of the intermediate position between universalism and culturalism.

5
This epistemology will hopefully reveal the logical structure of a legitimate method of
contextualization. It will equip STI researchers with broader vision and insight about
their cross-national investigations, empower them to be more critical and conscious on
their methodology, and expose some faulty but prevalent assumptions. The new
epistemology can also introduce novel insights into the debate between universalists and
culturalists. It can demonstrate to universalists how much senseless would be neglecting
the local aspects of social phenomena. It can also show the importance of similarities to
culturalists.
Moving towards this end, the project utilizes the tools and terminology of computational
approach to conceptual change in science. This is a particular approach within the
broader field of conceptual change (see Nersessian, 1998) which is in turn a sub-field
(with philosophical affinities) of cognitive science. Importing insights from cognitive
psychology and making use of the tool box of artificial intelligence, computational
approach to conceptual change in science tries to provide computational models of
mental structures in scientist‟s mind and also models about the ways through which these
mental structures change (Thagard in series of writings for example: 1988, 1992, 1996,
1997, 2003).
A computational approach has several advantages for developing Sartori‟s model into an
elaborated epistemology of conceptual adaptation. In his writings, Sartori treats a concept
more or less as a self-evident and rather simple construct and does not dig into its internal
structure. A computational approach has the potentials and necessary tools to reveal the
complex internal structure of a concept and represent it in a way that is amenable to in-
depth and precise analysis. Consequently, Sartori‟s methodology of contextualization can
also be reformulated and enriched. Sartori views the process of contextualization as a
simple upward-downward transformation of a concept. This straightforward picture can
be enhanced using the insights provided by the computational approach to conceptual
change within which a variety of different ways for transformation of a scientific concept
has been introduced and analyzed. Amongst these categories of conceptual change that
have received analytical treatment, for instance, is the combination of concepts which is
obviously relevant to, and important in, cross-national application and adaptation of
concepts.

6
The language of computation has also advantages over traditional tools applied by
philosophers for logical reconstruction of reasoning processes in science. It is more
precise than ordinary language and psychologically more plausible than predicate
calculus and symbolic logic for representation of cognitive processes like conceptual
adaptation (See: Thagard, 1988). As compared to alternative psychological and cognitive
schools of thought that might seem relevant and applicable to the problem, the
application of a computational approach appears to be more defensible in this project.
This approach includes a strong sensitivity to normative and philosophical aspects of
cognitive processes that is almost absent, or at least of secondary importance, in purely
psychological or anthropological approaches (Cash, 1998). In addition, although there is
a rich psychological and anthropological literature on cross-cultural comparison of
concepts and mental representations, these studies normally focus on folk concepts and
rarely on scientific concepts1. They also emphasize on comparison and not on application
or adaptation of concepts (Robertson & Beasley, 2008). The contextualization of
scientific concepts, therefore, seems to be more effectively treatable within the
computational tradition which has been concerned for a long time with the
representational and epistemological analysis of scientific conceptual change.
The computational approach and the methodology of Sartori can be viewed in this project
as two currents that integrate into a normative and abstract framework for
contextualization of social concepts. A third current that ensures the external relevance
and consistency of the final framework comes from the actual practices of conceptual
adaptation in STI studies.
The project relies upon normative naturalism as its underlying meta-epistemological
approach. A principal tenet within this paradigm is that any prescription should be
informed by empirical evidence about what is going on in the reality (Laudan, 1990).
Normative naturalism views empirical account of the actual mental processes as an
unavoidable prerequisite for prescription. But it goes beyond mere description of these
processes to identify what sorts of inferential practices are normatively correct (Thagard,

1
An exception to this rule is an emerging sub-field of anthropology called cognitive anthropology of
science which applies the methodology of cognitive anthropology to the study of science (see for example:
Atran, 1990; Heintz, 2004). The field, however, has not been yet attentive to the issue of conceptual
adaptation.

7
1988, p.7) (Further elaboration on normative naturalism appears in the methodology
section of the proposal).
The project, therefore, will need to be in continuous interaction with the actual practices
of STI scholars. It should particularly focus on the historical development of an
„exemplar concept‟ (see Thagard, 1988, p.118) which is regarded in the discipline as a
notable achievement (More detailed introduction of the notion of exemplar comes in the
methodology section). The exemplar picked up for this project is the concept of National
Innovation System (NIS). The concept has a quite impressive rate of popularity within
the discipline and has been used as a tool by policy makers at the national level as well as
by experts in international organizations for economic cooperation such as OECD,
Unctad, the World Bank and the EU Commission (Lundvall, 2003). The NIS concept has
also a rich record of both being applied (Cassiolato at al., 2003, Muchie et al., 2004,
Baskaran & Muchie, 2006), and being adapted (Viotti, 2002) to the contexts other than
the ones from which it originated. The concept, therefore, has already undergone various
processes of application in several cross-national investigations. These investigations can
provide empirical descriptions about actual practices of contextualization in STI studies.
NIS plays a twofold role in this project. The concept and its story of internationalization
will be used during the research to provide empirical insights for the main aim of the
project, i.e., development of an epistemological framework for conceptual
contextualization. In the end, once the framework is attained, the NIS concept will be
used again for assessing the strength and usefulness of that very framework. The
framework will be applied to conduct in-depth analyses on some important instances of
contextualization of NIS concept revealing probable methodological flaws and incorrect
assumptions underlying these processes of application.
The results of the project can also be evaluated by applying them to some of the current
debates in the STI studies. There are some controversies, for example, within national
innovation system‟s literature in which some scholars argue that the concept should not
be „overtheorized‟ (Lundvall, 2003). Another position contrastingly believes that the
concept is „undertheorized‟ and its clarity should be increased (Fischer, 2001, Edquist,
2004). The rigorous computational approach and the framework that is developed in this

8
research, it is hoped, will present a novel understanding of this debate and may introduce
new pathways within which the future research on NIS will flow.
The proposed project has contributions within the STI discipline. Introducing a second-
order and precise approach to the challenge of conceptual adaptation, the project provides
an effective tool for conscious thinking in cross-national investigations in STI studies. A
by-product of the research, consequently, will be to draw attention to the importance of
philosophy for science, technology, and innovation studies; a reality that in fact has been
almost neglected thus far.
The level of abstraction in this investigation allows for the results to be applicable beyond
the STI discipline. The project proposes a new approach to a classic and important issue
in the philosophy of social sciences applying the potentialities of naturalized
epistemology and conceptual change to a field that has rarely been investigated by these
new approaches. The project demonstrates the implications of this initiative for the STI
field but it can also be viewed as a starting point for a broader project of developing a
comprehensive epistemology for cross-national research in social science.

Research Questions

Lead Question:
Within the paradigm of naturalized epistemology, how can computational approach to
conceptual change in science be used to develop a normative framework for cross-
cultural contextualization of concepts in science, technology, and innovation studies?

Sub Question:
What are the main epistemological characteristics of the concept of National Innovation
System? What are specific epistemological characteristics of the normative framework
according to which the NIS concept should be contextualized in cross-national
investigations?

9
Methodology
Traditionally, philosophers of science have used two approaches for articulating the ways
of scientific reasoning. On the one hand, the rationalist philosophers have tried to
discover principles of reasoning through a priori reflections on the necessary conditions
of the rational mind. On the other hand, there are philosophers who have emphasized on
the importance of actual realization of scientific reasoning throughout the history. These
philosophers have criticized the plausibility of the claim that there is an essential way in
which rational minds do and must think. These philosophers deny any normative canon
of logic and epistemology and hold a relativistic position on the correct ways of
reasoning.
The proposed project relies upon an intermediate philosophical approach, namely
normative naturalism, which attempts to reconcile the normative commitment of
epistemology with an emphasis on the historical and actual conduct of science in the real
world. The main tenets of normative naturalism as Larry Laudan (1990) summarizes
them are:
● normative rules of epistemology are best construed as hypothetical imperatives, linking
means and ends;
● the soundness of such prudential imperatives depends on certain empirical claims about
the connections between means and ends;
● accordingly, empirical information about the relative frequencies with which various
epistemic means are likely to promote sundry epistemic ends is a crucial desideratum for
deciding on the correctness of epistemic rules;
● so construed, epistemic norms or rules are grounded on theories about how to conduct
inquiry, and those rules behave functionally within the system of knowledge in precisely
the same way that other theories (for example straightforward scientific ones) do
(Laudan, 1990)
To make these principles ready for use as a procedural and clear research methodology,
Paul Thagard, has proposed a five-step algorithm as follows:
1. We select exemplars of actual scientific practice. Selection is made on the basis of
subsequent events in the history of science that have marked the cases as significant
contributions to the growth of scientific knowledge.

10
2. We develop case studies that describe scientific practice.
3. We assume – or this can be argued for – that scientists have generally been successful
in achieving the epistemic goals of science.
4. Then the actual methods of the scientists in our case studies are at least an
approximation to what the methods ought to be. Within the limitations of the historical
record, we describe the scientists‟ methods.
5. We reflect philosophically on the methods found in the case studies, developing more
complex normative models, which can then be applied to other case studies (Thagard,
1988, p. 118).
The linearity that is pretended in this five-step process, as Thagard himself admits (ibid.),
is misleading. Historical analyses of scientific events and normative philosophizing
should be viewed as parts of a dynamic system of recurring influences best represented
not by a sequence of steps, but by a feedback process as depicted in the figure 1 below:

Methodological Normative
Principles Case Study Framework

Figure 1. Developing Normative Model in a Dynamic Process

The proposed project can be viewed as a computationally oriented attempt to investigate

some possible results of normative naturalism in a new scientific arena; science,
technology, and innovation studies. The concept of National Innovation System is used as
an exemplar indicating the actual scientific practice in the field. The historical
development of the concept and its application to different national contexts is analyzed
as the first estimation of a normative framework for contextualization of concepts. This
framework is elaborated further then using the tools and terminology of computational
approach to conceptual change in science. In the end, the soundness of the developed
model will be assessed by reflecting again on the NIS concept to see how it might be
developed in the future.

11
Original Contribution of the Dissertation
The proposed project has contributions within the STI discipline. Introducing a second-
order and precise approach to the challenge of conceptual adaptation, the project provides
an effective tool for conscious thinking in cross-national investigations in STI studies. A
by-product of the research, consequently, will be to draw attention to the importance of
philosophy for science, technology, and innovation studies; a reality that in fact has been
almost neglected thus far.
The level of abstraction in this investigation allows for the results to be applicable beyond
the STI discipline. The project proposes a new approach to a classic and important issue
in the philosophy of social sciences applying the potentialities of naturalized
epistemology and conceptual change to a field that has rarely been investigated by these
new approaches. The project demonstrates the implications of this initiative for the STI
field but it can also be viewed as a starting point for a broader project of developing a
comprehensive epistemology for cross-national research in social science.

12
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