Wissenschaft als System. Von der Black Box zum Black Hole - und retour ...?

Abstract: Despite a variety of adventure stories with respect to the enlightening and indispensable roles of the scientific enterprise within the process of occidental modernizations, the main purpose of the subsequent investigations lies in answering the question, whether the scientific system should be qualified either as a nearly inaccessible and almost unobservable entity whose cognitive dynamics remains almost totally unknown or as an easily observable and empirically accessible unit whosecognitive dynamics can be identified without further difficulties. For the time being, it will be regarded as an undecided problem whether the scientific system should be viewed as a black box type in which, until now, only insufficient observationshave been made or whether a conceptualization of the system of science should be undertaken in the way of a black hole metaphor where, in principle , only extremely little information is accessible both for an inside and an outside observer. To answer the central question on the status of observability of the scientific system, three areas will be analysed: first, a dense description, albeit one without empirical grounding, will be presented on the search environment, namely on the development patterns of the social sciences in Austria over the last fifty years; second, a collection of three articles will demonstrate, from various perspectives , the results of empirical search processes with respect to basic data collections on scientific development; and third, a brief summary will be given on feasible and potentially rewarding ways of empirical data collections for the scientific realms.;