Programming languages for social simulations are rapidly proliferating. The result is a Tower of Babel effect: Many of us find it increasingly effortful to learn and to teach more programming languages and increasingly difficult to sustain an audience beyond the programming dialect of our...

This briefly reviews some philosophy of science that might be relevant to simulating the social processes of science. It also includes a couple of examples from the sociology of science because these are inextricable from the philosophy.

Science is the result of a substantially social process. That is, science relies on many inter-personal processes, including: selection and communication of research findings, discussion of method, checking and judgement of others' research, development of norms of scientific behaviour,...