Abstract
<p>Chapter 12 of the second volume of Pitirim A. Sorokin's Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937), "Fluctuation of General and Special Scientific Theories," incorporates material from a typescript prepared for Sorokin by Robert K. Merton, "Oscillations in Scientific Theories," submitted under a cover letter dated 8 June 1933. The collaboration is acknowledged in the chapter itself (Sorokin's notes 1 and 127); this report accordingly characterizes the compositional division of labour within an acknowledged collaboration rather than adjudicating impropriety. Both documents were transcribed by independent OCR of their page scans and compared by order-independent exact-token collation, a windowed fuzzy pass, citation-apparatus cross-reference, and a framework-vocabulary differential; all overlap figures are lower bounds.The chapter divides into two zones. Its natural-science core — atomism, mechanism/vitalism, abiogenesis, light, and Prout's hypothesis — reproduces Merton's typescript closely (62 % of the core at light paraphrase, 69 % at moderate; longest verbatim run 141 words), in the same sequence and with the same quotations and citation apparatus; two conjunctive citations fix the direction of dependence as Merton → Sorokin. The interpretive framework — the typology of the three systems of truth and its correlation with culture-type — together with the sections on cosmogony, the general law of fluctuation, the social sciences, and the conclusion, is Sorokin's own and absent from Merton. The relation is one of embedding: Merton supplied the historical material and its apparatus, Sorokin the theory and its application.</p>