A Scientometric Approach to the Integrated History and Philosophy of Science: Entrenched Biomedical Standardisation and Citation-Exemplar

Abstract

Is Kuhn's notion of exemplar applicable to ongoing biomedical sciences? Many philosophers may be skeptical because Kuhn's cases are mostly from physics and chemistry. However, how do philosophers test the above (non-)applicability directly? We will use examples to illustrate a scientometric approach to the integrated history and philosophy of science (SciHPS) and argue that SciHPS can provide an empirical basis to empirically test and revise a philosophical concept questioned for its applicability to biomedical sciences. This paper will build on Yan, Tsai, and Huang's (2021) heart-rate variability (HRV) case study to examine the biomedical changes within the HRV community from 1970 to 2022. We will investigate how a Task Force standardizes and entrenches methodological standardizations, and argue that some of Task Force's methodological standardizations are tool-afforded by an algorithm. These tool-afforded aspects further explain why an HRV method is robustly dominant in the HRV community despite other HRV scholars having developed alternatives to compete with the dominant one. We will then show how to use SciHPS to empirically test and revise the Kuhnian concept of exemplar into a concept of citation-exemplar that better captures the above tool-afforded aspects of standardizations.