Week 3

Function of science is to provide reliable knowledge

Therefore, as practice and institution science must be organized around certain norms

Sociology of science, then, studies scientific norms and mechanisms of their reinforcement and sanctions applied when scientists fail to follow the norms

Merton identified 4 main norms of science:

• Universalism: “race, nationality, religion, class, and personal qualities are irrelevant” (Merton 1973: 270)

• Communism: scientific knowledge is collectively owned; that is one cannot claim property rights over scientific knowledge

• Disinteretedness: scientists should not have their own interest in the results of their studies

• Organised skepticism: systematic disbelieve in new ideas until they are proven beyond doubt

Beside moral norms there are also cognitive norms governing the way scientists actually do science (e.g. what counts as evidence)

Merton was not interested in cognitive norms, because he drew a firm distinction between the practice of science and the content of science

In general, he was interested in the practice and did not question the content of science (mark this idea!)

Rewards in science are almost all honorific (that is based on fame)

• the highest rewards come in the form of eponymy: e.g. Halley’s comet

• Other forms: citations

It is assumed that people do science out of true and unconditional love for science

• compare it with other occupations to sense the difference; e.g. why do people work in accounting? (money)

Do really scientists follow the norms identified by Merton?

Can these norms be flexible and interpretable?

Can we even talk about a goal of something so complex as science?

To understand to what degree scientists follow the norms, it is interesting to look at cases when they actually failed to follow the norms

When you start digging deeper into the history of scientific frauds, you realize that lots of prominent scientists of the past were … basically fraudsters

Claudius Ptolemy, known as “the greatest astronomer of antiquity,” did not do most of his observing, but rather exappropriated the work of another Greek astronomer

Galileo Galilei actually didn’t do many of his experiments (though he was insisting that he did). His colleagues also had hard time reproducing his “experiments”

Isaac Newton relied on a fudge factor to make his predictions look better

• things were not adding up without that fudge factor

Mendel was meticulously experimenting with peas

Discovered what we know call genes

Identified dominant and recessive traits and the proportions in which they are expected in the offspring

Widely recognized as the founder of modern genetics

His data was extremely precise, too good to be true actually

The famous statistician, Ronald A. Fisher, examined Mendel’s data in 1936 and concluded that

• “The data of most, if not all, of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree closely with Mendel’s expectations”

“Another explanation would be that Mendel performed one or two more experiments and reported only those results that agreed with his expectation” (van der Waerden 1968)