Abstract
The “science of education” uses various terms and has different meanings in diverse countries, which are grounded in different knowledge traditions, worldviews, semantic frames of reference, networks, and cultural contexts. The frequent use of English seems to smooth out and ignore these diversities, which, at the same time, could be interpreted as sustainable and productive resources of knowledge and scholarly communication – seen both from a diachronic, historical and a synchronic, comparative point of view. In the context of a “social epistemology” we use the changes of disciplinary (self-) designations of the German “science of education” (Pädagogik, Erziehungswissenschaft, Bildungswissenschaft, Bildungsforschung) as an example, which indicates the transition from one generation of educational researchers to the next. Concluding remarks raise questions about the possible functional equivalents of these (or other) developments in the science of education in other contexts and point to the value of a (self-)critical social epistemology for the science of education in a historical and comparative context.