I argue that in epistemically well-designed scientific communities, scientists are united by mutual epistemic responsibilities, and epistemic responsibilities are understood not merely as epistemic but also as moral duties. Epistemic responsibilities can be understood as moral duties because they contribute to the well-being of other human beings by showing respect for them, especially in their capacity as knowers. A moral account of epistemically responsible behaviour is needed to supplement accounts that appeal to scientists’ self-interests or personal epistemic goals. This (...) is because neither the self-interest nor the epistemic account can always explain why it is rational for an individual scientist to be epistemically responsible. (shrink)

Considering Kuhn’s emphasis on the community structure of science, this paper focuses on the scientific community to inquire whether the recent global financial crisis ushered paradigm change in economics. To appraise the nature and the extent of post-crisis change, we examine the methodological constitution of the dominant paradigm identified as New Consensus Macroeconomics, methodological commitments binding paradigm and scientific community, and assess the practice of the community, particularly the treatment of anomalies. Subsequently, an attempt (...) is made to illuminate whether/how sociological and institutional parameters in the community structure of the discipline bear upon prospects of change. Empirically, this research investigates, categorizes and evaluates post-crisis responses and perceptions of the scientific community. The overarching aim is to determine whether economics responded to a major anomaly with critical self-reflection on the adequacy of its methodological toolbox, leading to theory change, and to shed light on institutional aspects influence this process. (shrink)

The intellectual organization of the sciences cannot be appreciated sufficiently unless the cognitive dimension is considered as an independent source of variance. Cognitive structures interact and co-construct the organization of scholars and discourses into research programs, specialties, and disciplines. In the sociology of scientific knowledge and the sociology of translation, these heterogeneous sources of variance have been homogenized a priori in the concepts of practices and actor-networks. Practices and actor-networks, however, can be explained in terms of the self-organization of (...) the cognitive code in scientific communication. The code selects knowledge claims by organizing them operationally in the various discourses; the claims can thus be stabilized and potentially globalized. Both the selecting codes and the variation in the knowledge claims remain constructed, but the different sub-dynamics can be expected to operate asymmetrically and to update with other frequencies. (shrink)

This contribution describes—with some documentary support from Peirce’s correspondence of his first and second European trips—Peirce’s conception of science as a collective and co-operative activity of all those whose lives are animated by the desire to find out the truth, whose lives are animated by “an impulse to penetrate into the reason of things.” The paper has two sections: first, Peirce as an inventor and builder of research instruments around which scientific communities are formed, and, second, Peirce’s own experience (...) of cooperation within science. (shrink)

In the past few years, social epistemologists have developed several formal models of the social organisation of science. While their robustness and representational adequacy has been analysed at length, the function of these models has begun to be discussed in more general terms only recently. In this article, I will interpret many of the current formal models of the scientific community as representing the latest development of what I will call the ‘Kuhnian project’. These models share with Kuhn (...) a number of questions about the relation between individuals and communities. At the same time, they also inherit some of Kuhn’s problematic characterisations of the scientific community. In particular, current models of the social organisation of science represent the scientific community as essentially value-free. This may put into question both their representational adequacy and their normative ambitions. In the end, it will be shown that the discussion on the formal models of the scientific community may contribute in fruitful ways to the ongoing debates on value judgements in science. (shrink)

Communication is a crucial component of scientific activity (as of virtually any other domain of human activity, especially in this "communication age" in which we live). As researchers and as citizens, we should all be concerned with the communication of science as well as with communication within science. In this paper, I will deal with one of the key aspects of this topic ג€“ the question whether scientific communication is or should be ג€�transparentג€�. The view that this is (...) or should be the case is often taken for granted both by scientists and the general public. I will challenge this view and suggest that we should learn to live without the illusion that scientific communication is or should be transparent. This idea is closely related, if not derived from, the traditional epistemological conception according to which scientific method is the privileged tool we have for penetrating beyond appearances and discovering the true ג€�nature of thingsג€�, in terms of which all observable phenomena should be ultimately explained. Applying the scientific method should, thus, yield a fully intelligible representation of the world, which in its turn should be transparently communicable. The trouble with this enticing ideal is that it does not correspond to actual practice. Again and again we experience the fact that the ג€�true picture of the worldג€� remains veiled for everyone but a small group of initiated experts in a narrow domain. Is this only a technical problem having to do with the phenomenon of specialization and with the inevitable complexity of the language(s) of science, as it is often suggested? (shrink)

Communication by scientists with policy makers and attentive publics raises ethical issues. Scientists need to decide how to communicate knowledge effectively in a way that nonscientists can understand and use, while remaining honest scientists and presenting estimates of the uncertainty of their inferences. They need to understand their own ethical choices in using scientific information to communicate to audiences. These issues were salient in the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with respect to possible sea level (...) rise from disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Due to uncertainty, the reported values of projected sea level rise were incomplete, potentially leading some relevant audiences to underestimate future risk. Such judgments should be made in a principled rather than an ad hoc manner. Five principles for scientific communication under such conditions are important: honesty, precision, audience relevance, process transparency, and specification of uncertainty about conclusions. Some of these principles are of intrinsic importance while others are merely instrumental and subject to trade-offs among them. Scientists engaged in assessments under uncertainty should understand these principles and which trade-offs are acceptable. (shrink)

The hypothermia experiments performed on humans during the Second World War at the German concentration camp in Dachau have been regarded as crimes against humanity, disguised as medical research. For almost 50 years, scientists maintained that the study produced valuable, even if not totally reliable, information. In recent years, the results from the Dachau hypothermia project were glamorized with life-saving potential and a heated ethical dialogue was activated about the use of life-saving but tainted scientific information. In the wake (...) of the debate, an in-depth examination of the scientific rigour of the project was performed and revealed that neither the science nor the scientists from Dachau could be trusted and that the data were worthless. The body of medical opinion accepted the unfavourable determination but a few scientists and ethicists have continued to endorse the validity, of at least parts, of the Dachau hypothermia data. The conduct of the scientific communications about the Dachau hypothermia experiments by the scientific and ethical communities invites serious consideration of a possible ethical misadventure. It appears that for almost 50 years, the results of the study had been endorsed without careful examination of the scientific base of the experiments and that secondary citation of relevant original material may have been commonly employed. These infractions contributed to a myth that good science was practised by the Nazis at Dachau. The more recent emphasis on the life-saving potential of the Dachau data, without citation of credible supporting evidence, has also been misleading. Similarly, acceptance of a determination by an in-depth examination that the 'whole' Dachau project if flawed with simultaneous endorsement of the validity of 'parts' of the results, poses an ethical problem. It is advisable that before seeking ethical consultation about the use of unethically obtained data, scientists should examine the quality of science behind the controversial information and ethicists should verify the integrity of the material prior to engaging in a dialogue. (shrink)

There is a large gap between the specialized knowledge of scientists and laypeople’s understanding of the sciences. The novice-expert problem arises when non-experts are confronted with (real or apparent) scientific disagreement, and when they don’t know whom to trust. Because they are not able to gauge the content of expert testimony, they rely on imperfect heuristics to evaluate the trustworthiness of scientists. This paper investigates why some bodies of scientific knowledge become polarized along political fault lines. Laypeople navigate (...) conflicting epistemic and social demands in their acceptance of scientific testimony; this might explain their deference to scientific fringe theories, which often goes together with denying established scientific theories. I evaluate three approaches to mitigate denialism: improving the message, improving the messenger, and improving the environment in which the message is conveyed. (shrink)

The scientific community takes for granted a view of science that may be called standard empiricism. This holds that the basic intellectual aim of science is truth, nothing being presupposed about the truth, the basic method being to assess theories with respect to evidence. A basic tenet of the view is that science must not accept any thesis about the world as a part of scientific knowledge independent of evidence, let alone in violation of evidence. But physics (...) only accepts unified theories, and persistently rejects infinitely many ad hoc rivals that fit the phenomena even better. In persistently rejecting these infinitely many empirically more successful rival theories, physics thereby makes a substantial assumption about the universe – it is such that all ad hoc theories are false – an assumption that is accepted implicitly independently of evidence, even in a sense against the evidence. That contradicts standard empiricism. The scientific community needs to adopt a new conception of science that represents the assumption of physics as a hierarchy of assumptions, thus facilitating the improvement of the assumption that is made, as science proceeds. (shrink)

To believe that every single scientist ought to be individually engaged in ethical thinking in order for science to be responsible at a collective level may be too demanding, if not plainly unrealistic. In fact, ethical labor is typically distributed across different kinds of scientists within the scientific community. Based on the empirical data collected within the Horizon 2020 ‘RRI-Practice’ project, we propose a classification of the members of the scientific community depending on their engagement in (...) this collective activity. Our classification offers, on the one hand, a model of how the ethical aspects of science are taken into consideration by scientists and, on the other, some indications on how to institutionalize ethics in science. (shrink)

(1995). Positivist discourse and social scientific communities: Towards an epistemological sociology of science. Social Epistemology: Vol. 9, Knowledge (EX) Change, pp. 233-255.

Trust in the scientific enterprise — in science as an institution — is arguably important to individuals’ and societies’ well-being. Although some measures of public trust in science exist, the recipients of that trust are often ambiguous between trusting individual scientists and the scientific community at large. We argue that more precision would be beneficial — specifically, targeting public trust of the scientific community at large — and describe the development and validation of such an (...) instrument: the Scientific Community Trust Index (SCTI). We show the results of initial field testing to establish instrument reliability and validity. We then demonstrate certain advantages of the SCTI against other measures of trust and deference, and present correlations between the SCTI and participant scores in two trust-in-science scenarios. Our results suggest that the SCTI is a useful and compact tool for measuring public trust in the scientific community. (shrink)

Generic generalisations like ‘Opioids are highly addictive’ are very useful in scientific communication, but they can often be interpreted in many different ways. Although this is not a problem when all interpretations provide the same answer to the question under discussion, a problem arises when a generic generalisation is used to answer a question other than that originally intended. In such cases, some interpretations of the generalisation might answer the question in a way that the original speaker would not (...) endorse. Rather than excising generic generalisations from scientific communication, I recommend that scientific communicators carefully consider the kinds of questions their words might be taken to answer and try to avoid phrasing that might be taken to provide unintended answers. (shrink)

This article argues that various deviations from the basic principles of the scientific ethos – primarily the appearance of pseudoscience in scientific communities – can be formulated and explained using specific models of game theory, such as the prisoner’s dilemma and the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. The article indirectly tackles the deontology of scientific work as well, in which it is assumed that there is no room for moral skepticism, let alone moral anti-realism, in the ethics of (...) class='Hi'>scientific communities. Namely, on the basis of the generally accepted dictum of scientific endeavor as the pursuit of knowledge exclusively for knowledge’s sake, scientifically »right« behavior is seen to be clearly defined and distinguishable from scientifically »wrong« behavior. After elucidating the basic principles of game theory, the article illustrates – by using imaginary and real cases, as well as some views from the philosophyof biology (the units of selection debate) – how this sort of reasoning could be applied in an analysis of the functioning of science. (shrink)

In the days of global warming and BSE, science is increasingly a public issue. This book provides a theoretical framework which allows us to understand why and how scientists address the general public. The author develops the argument that turning to the public is not simply a response to inaccurate reporting by journalists or to public curiosity, nor a wish to gain recognition and additional funding. Rather, it is a tactic to which the scientific community are pushed by (...) certain "internal" crisis situations. Bucchi examines three cases of scientists turning to the public: the cold fusion case, the COBE/Big Bang issue and Louis Pasteur's public demonstration of the anthrax vaccine, a historical case of "public science." Finally, Bucchi presents his unique model of communications between science and the public, carried out through the media. This is a thoughtful and wide-ranging treatment of complex contemporary issues, touching upon the history and sociology of science, communication and media studies. Bucchi's theories on scientific communication in the media are a valuable contribution to the current debate on this subject. (shrink)

Ayudha Puja, a South Indian festival translated as “worship of the machines,” is a dramatic example of how religion and science intertwine in political life. Across South India, but especially in the state of Karnataka, scientists and engineers celebrate the festival in offices, laboratories, and workshops by attending a puja led by a priest. Although the festival is noteworthy in many ways, one of its most immediate valences is political. In this article, we argue that Ayudha Puja normalizes Brahminical Hinduism (...) within scientific culture through the inclusion of non-Hindus and through scientists' description of the festival as “cultural” rather than “religious.”. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of mid-level models, which calibrate highly theoretical agent-based models of scientific communities by incorporating empirical information from real-world systems. As a result, these models more closely correspond with real-world communities, and are better suited for informing policy decisions than extant how-possibly models. I provide an exemplar of a mid-level model of science funding allocation that incorporates bibliometric data from scientific publications and data generated from empirical studies of peer review into an epistemic landscape (...) model. The results of my model show that on a dynamic epistemic landscape, allocating funding by modified and pure lottery strategies performs comparably to a perfect selection funding allocation strategy. These results support the idea that introducing randomness into a funding allocation process may be a tractable policy worth exploring further through pilot studies. My exemplar shows that agent-based models need not be restricted to the abstract and the a-priori; they can also be informed by real empirical data. (shrink)

The prevalence and characteristics of research misconduct have mainly been studied in highly developed countries. In moderately or poorly developed countries such as Croatia, data on research misconduct are scarce. The primary aim of this study was to determine the rates at which scientists report committing or observing the most serious forms of research misconduct, such as falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, and violation of authorship rules in the Croatian scientific community. Additionally, we sought to determine the degree of development (...) and the extent of implementation of the system for defining and regulating research misconduct in a typical scientific community in Croatia. An anonymous questionnaire was distributed among 1232 Croatian scientists at the University of Rijeka in 2012/2013 and 237 returned the survey. Based on the respondents who admitted having committed research misconduct, 9 admitted to plagiarism, 22 to data falsification, 9 to data fabrication, and 60 respondents admitted to violation of authorship rules. Based on the respondents who admitted having observed research misconduct of fellow scientists, 72 observed plagiarism, 69 observed data falsification, 46 observed data fabrication, and 132 respondents admitted having observed violation of authorship rules. The results of our study indicate that the efficacy of the system for managing research misconduct in Croatia is poor. At the University of Rijeka there is no document dedicated exclusively to research integrity, describing the values that should be fostered by a scientist and clarifying the forms of research misconduct and what constitutes a questionable research practice. Scientists do not trust ethical bodies and the system for defining and regulating research misconduct; therefore the observed cases of research misconduct are rarely reported. Finally, Croatian scientists are not formally educated about responsible conduct of research at any level of their formal education. All mentioned indicate possible reasons for higher rates of research misconduct among Croatian scientists in comparison with scientists in highly developed countries. (shrink)

The paper reveals some mostly unnoticed and unexpected trends in reception of novel ideas in science. The author formulates certain principles of the reception of these ideas by scientific communities and justifies them by examples from modern mathematics and non-classical logic.

The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficulties encountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills’ classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the authors follow the development of a story as it comes to assist in transforming individual troubles in standard implementation (...) into an institutional issue for the ecological scientific community. The authors present the “hands-on” social science collaboration in this study as an example of a mechanism for supporting institutionalization of issues. Finally, the authors argue that narratives can serve as effective organizing principles within institutional settings, thereby providing an approach to understand the practical, substantive difficulties that occur in work with data in the sciences. (shrink)

Research programs regularly compete to achieve the same goal, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA or the construction of a TEA laser. The more the competing programs share information, the faster the goal is likely to be reached, to society’s benefit. But the “priority rule”-the scientific norm according to which the first program to reach the goal in question must receive all the credit for the achievement-provides a powerful disincentive for programs to share information. How, then, (...) is the clash between social and individual interest resolved in scientific practice? This chapter investigates what Robert Merton called science’s “communist” norm, which mandates universal sharing of knowledge, and uses mathematical models of discovery to argue that a communist regime may be on the whole advantageous and fair to all parties, and so might be implemented by a social contract that all scientists would be willing to sign. (shrink)

The author analyzes proof and argumentation as a form of appeal to a scientific community with deep ethical meaning. He presents proof primarily as an effort to persuade a scientific community rather than a search for true knowledge, as an instrument by which responsibility is taken for the correctness of the thesis being proved, which usually originates in a sudden flash of insight.

Drawing on 10 sets of data gathered in the General Social Survey between 2000 and 2018, this study examined whether confidence in the press mediated political party affiliation as a determinant of attitudes toward the scientific community. The study observed full mediation effects in three of five instances in which Republicans occupied the White House, with partial or no mediation observed at other points. Overall findings showed that males, White respondents, and those who had completed more years of (...) school, as well as Democrats and those who indicated higher levels of confidence in the press, tended to report greater levels of confidence in the scientific community. The study discusses quantitative results in light of increased partisanship and derisive attacks on news media. (shrink)

Duhem—Quine underdetermination plays a constructive role in epistemology by pinpointing the impact of non-empirical virtues or cognitive values on theory choice. Underdetermination thus contributes to illuminating the nature of scientific rationality. Scientists prefer and accept one account among empirical equivalent alternatives. The non-empirical virtues operating in science are laid open in such theory choice decisions. The latter act as an epistemological test tube in making explicit commitments to how scientific knowledge should be like.

This article examines the communication networks within and between science and technology studies (STS) and the history of science. In particular, journal relatedness data are used to analyze some of the structural features of their disciplinary identities and relationships. The results first show that, although the history of science is more than half a century older than STS, the size of the STS network is more than twice that of the history of science network. Further, while a majority of the (...) journals in the STS network are connected by weak ties, about half of the history of science network consists of strong ties. The history of science network is thus more cohesive than the STS network. The relatively strong cohesion within the history of science network is associated with comparatively high degrees of intra-disciplinary communication, but comparatively weak ties to only a few related disciplines. The analysis also shows that very few members of the history of science cliques are situated on the shortest path between both specialties. Moreover, given the relatively impermeable nature of the history of science network, the latter partially depends on STS to reach some of the neighboring disciplines. (shrink)

A study of research scientists working at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.

volume 1. Quantifying diversity and formulating success -- volume 2. Perspectives and exemplary programs.

The social epistemology of science to date has not adequately accounted for the embodied nature of cognition. This lacuna is evidenced in part by what Fred D’Agostino refers to as an “undertow” in the philosophy of science, which has pulled some of Kuhn’s revolutionary conceptual innovations back towards the traditional notions they are meant to replace. My primary concern in the following is to show how framing neo-Kuhnian social epistemology within the embodiment movement in cognitive science blunts such reactionary re-interpretations. (...) In §2, I argue that linguistically centered conceptions of rationality and normativity leave neo-Kuhnian accounts... (shrink)

This article argues that various deviations from the basic principles of the scientific ethos – primarily the appearance of pseudoscience in scientific communities – can be formulated and explained using specific modelsof game theory, such as the prisoner’s dilemma and the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. The article indirectly tackles the deontology of scientific work as well, in which it is assumed that there is no room for moral skepticism, let alone moral anti-realism, in the ethics of scientific (...) communities. Namely, on the basis of the generally accepted dictum of scientific endeavor as the pursuit of knowledge exclusively for knowledge’s sake, scientifically »right« behavior is seen to be clearly defined and distinguishable from scientifically »wrong« behavior. After elucidating the basic principles of game theory, the article illustrates – by using imaginary and real cases, as well as some views from the philosophyof biology – how this sort of reasoning could be applied in an analysis of the functioning of science.U članku se tvrdi da se različite devijacije od osnovnih načela etosa znanosti – prije svega pojava pseudoznanosti u znanstvenim zajednicama – mogu formulirati i objasniti pomoću specifičnih modela teorije igara kao što su zatvorenikova dilema i ponovljena zatvorenikova dilema. Članak se, prema tome, neizravno bavi i deontologijom znanstvenoga rada, pri čemu je ključna pretpostavka da u etici znanstvenih zajednica nema mjesta moralnom skepticizmu, a kamoli moralnom antirealizmu: naime, znanstveno »ispravno« ponašanje smatra se jasno definiranim i razlučivim od znanstveno »pogrešnog« ponašanja na osnovi općeprihvaćene maksime znanstvenoga rada kao potrage za znanjem isključivo radi znanja. Nakon izlaganja osnovnih načela teorije igara, pokazuje se – koristeći se imaginarnim i zbiljskim slučajevima, kao i nekim stavovima iz filozofije biologije – kako bi se ovu vrstu razmišljanja moglo primijeniti u analizi funkcioniranja znanosti. (shrink)