Harry Collins

Sociologist of science and a founder of the "Empirical Programme of Relativism" (EPOR), the Bath School strand of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) — distinct from the separate Strong Programme associated with Edinburgh. His "Stages in the Empirical Programme of Relativism" (1981) and Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (1985) are the explicit methodological foundation Mikel Olazaran's 1993 sociological history of the Perceptrons controversy says it applies — Olazaran's own conclusion names "the controversy-closure scheme from the sociology of science (Collins, 1981, 1985)" as the interpretive tool for how the Minsky–Papert critique was read differently by rival neural-network research groups, and how that interpretive flexibility closed.

Matters to this vault as the actual governing analytic framework behind its own primary source for the Perceptrons controversy — a framework the vault had, until now, read past without naming, crediting the chapter's conclusions to Olazaran alone.

References

• claim-olazaran-1993-applies-merton-multiple-discovery-to-werbos-not-perceptrons-dispute
• Captures: 2026-10-06-bipartite-ml-ai-epistemology-no-standalone-1969-first-edition-scan