-> Traditional empiricism neglected the social structure of science; naturalistic philosophy has tried to avoid this mistake
David Hull’s “Science as a Process,” written in 1988, was the result of his observations and interactions with biologists who study systematics, the classification of organisms.
Is science a fundamentally cooperative enterprise, or a competitive one in which scientists are out for personal advancement?
According to Hull and Merton, science runs on a combination of cooperation and competition. The special features of science are due to an interaction between the two.
This interaction arises from science’s reward system and the context within which it operates.
Hull stresses the desire to have one’s ideas used
Merton stresses being recognized as the first to come up with an idea
-> Each scientist inherits the ideas and methods of her field from earlier workers. Even revolutionary work starts off from an inherited context.
You can’t make a contribution of your own without using the work of others a.k.a. citations.
Scientists trade credit for support in the hopes that it will be reciprocated out of a special kind of self-interest. -> This is why replicability is so important.
Those who check and replicate results are often:
those who need to know whether they can rely on those ideas.
someone whose won work is either discredited or made less important by a piece of new work
So in Hull’s view, this desire to have one’s work used generates special features of science:
elaborate networks of citations
real but selective checking of others’ results
relative seriousness of fraud and theft
Cooperation and teamwork is common
Hypotheses are closely scrutinized
Idle speculation and shoddy work are discouraged
Ideas are shared freely (not in publishable form though)
Work produced by those low on the totem pole is taken seriously, especially by those with a self-interest to check it
-> Between an Imaginative Voice and a Critical Voice
-> Between the Speculative and the Hard-Headed
Popper was attracted to this view.
In contrast, Hull argued that individual scientists don’t need to take a cautious and skeptical attitude towards their own work because others will do this for them.
Although curiosity and a desire for recognition are fairly basic human motivations, the desire for the specific kid of credit found in science is more unusual.
A basic human desire for credit is shaped by the internal culture off science into a very specific desire for recognition in the form of use.
Modern science developed in European societies that were comfortable with ideas of individual competition and credit.
Henry Oldenburg used rapid publication in the “Proceedings” to allocate credit and to encourage people to share their ideas. His system, which also included anonymous refereeing of papers, is essentially what’s come down to us today.
Science changes via processes of variation and selection like biological populations
Individual ideas in science are replicated like genes
The different rates with which ideas are replicated are consequences of their manifestations in the brains the public representational systems of the scientific community. Scientific change is a process in which some ideas outcompete others in a struggle for replication.
Examples of representational systems:
Books
Journals
Computers
The idea of understanding scientific change via biological analogy was also done by:
Toulmin in 1972
Campbell in 1974
Dennett in 1995
Popper, although he didn’t start off with this analogy in mind
The analogy between science and Darwinian evolution has not yielded many new insights so far, although a wide variety of processes can be described in a way that borrows from evolutionary biology.
-> Kitcher answers, “What is the best distribution of workers across rival research programs, for the community as a whole.
Lakatos and Laudan viewed science as a competition between teams of workers developing rival theories and defending rival methods, but L & L only asked about rational choices that could be made at an individual level.
Kitcher (paraphrased):
Imagine you rule science from ‘up above’ and you’re responsible for allocating resources to rival research programs. Within a field, you find two programs that are addressing the same problem. 1 looks more promising than 2, but no one knows which approach will work. How should you allocate resources to maximize the chance that a scientific problem will be solved?
A wise ‘ruler of science’ would allocate most of the resources to the better research program, but some resources to the alternative – a.k.a. ‘bet-hedging’.
Degree to which one program is more promising than the other
Mathematical functions that describe how each research program responds to the addition of more resources.
Both programs become more likely to succeed as more workers are added to them, but in both cases there’s a ‘decreasing marginal return’ – each additional worker makes less of a difference to the chances of success.
So after a certain point, workers would be better off allocated to an alternative program where they’d make more of an impact.
Kitcher (paraphrased):
What kind of (individual) reward system will tend to produce the same distribution of workers that the ‘ruler from above’ would want?
What kind of individual reward system in science will tend to produce distributions of workers that benefit science as a whole?
Giving a fixed reward to everyone who works on the successful program would induce everyone to participate in the more promising program.
Rewarding individuals for making choices that produce the maximum benefit in terms of the overall chance that the community will solve the problem doesn’t seem realistic for actual scientific communities.
Rewarding only the individuals who work on the research program that succeeds, but dividing the ‘pie’ equally between all the workers who chose that program. So reward depends not only on an individual’s choice, but on how many others made the same choice.
Kitcher argued this produces a good distribution of workers across the two options because of a desire to maximize ‘expected payoff’
Arguments against Kitcher’s views on this second question:
A kind of ‘free riding’ is encouraged in Kitcher’s reward scheme
Michael Stevens in 2003 argued that a different reward scheme is better both for the scientific community and closer to what actually happens in science:
Rewards are allocated to an individual proportional to the contribution he makes to the particular research program he joins.
Payoff is only given if the program solves the scientific problem
The pie is shared unequally among those working on the successful program. Early joiners and impactors get more than workers who joined late and made little difference.
-> Science has hit upon a particularly effective way of coordinating individual energies to yield good outcomes for the community as a whole.
Argument endorsed by Hull and others (like Kitcher, Stevens)
Science exploits contact with the world humans have via experience, using it to explore and assess hypotheses about the world.
Thus, science can be seen as a strategy for answering questions and working out what to believe, but this works out much better at a community level than it does at an individual level.
The power of science is seen in the cumulative and coordinated nature of scientific work
each successive generation builds on the work of those who came before, and organizes its energies via collaboration and public discourse
-> This social organization lets scientific strategy function at the level of social groups.
Dialogue between critical and speculative voices becomes a literal dialogue instead of something internalized in the mindset of the individual scientist.
We need:
A suitable reward system
Science may need a specific kind of internal culture and reward system
The delicate balance between cooperation and competition is not easily achieved
Various external supports
Scientists need to be able to make a living
Society as a whole must allow questioning and open-ended inquiry
But:
Could science work as well or better with a different reward system?
Do we need the intense and egoistic competition found in the science of Western market-based societies?
Those who like competitive, individualist societies will be inclined to say yes.
Those who like communitarian, socialist societies will say no. Feminists claim the former option is more in tune with male temperaments.
A feminist perspective: The competitive culture of science could tend to produce subtle kinds of uniformity in scientific thinking, reducing the frequency of a valuable kind of input into scientific discussion.
-> His blunt assertion about the harmony between individual-level and group-level benefit in science might be overstated.
Hull discusses and extends work by sociologists on the temperament and leadership styles of successful scientists.
Data suggests that an aggressive faith in one’s own ideas (pushiness of a ‘true believer’) can be useful in some fields
E.g. Skinner vs Tolman: Skinner was more influential because he was almost absurdly strict and more dogmatic and pushy – he had a crusading zeal. Tolman on the other hand, was flexible, modest, open-minded and considerate.
Even if pushiness and zeal work well for individual scientists, they mostly don’t result in good outcomes for science. (e.g. Psychology would be better if Tolman had been popular instead).
Hull would have argued that it’s a small price to pay for the benefits gained form the present balance between competition and cooperation in science.
Naturalists hope that by combining philosophical analysis with input form other disciplines, we’ll eventually get a complete view of how science works and what sort of connection it gives us to the world (topic of next chapter).