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Unconceived alternatives and conservatism in science: the impact of professionalization, peer-review, and Big Science

  • S.I. : Conceived Alternatives
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Abstract

Scientific realists have suggested that changes in our scientific communities over the course of their history have rendered those communities progressively less vulnerable to the problem of unconcieved alternatives over time. I argue in response not only that the most fundamental historical transformations of the scientific enterprise have generated steadily mounting obstacles to revolutionary, transformative, or unorthodox scientific theorizing, but also that we have substantial independent evidence that the institutional apparatus of contemporary scientific inquiry fosters an exceedingly and increasingly theoretically conservative form of that inquiry. I conclude that contemporary scientific communities are actually more vulnerable to the problem of unconceived alternatives than their historical predecessors, and I briefly suggest how we might seek to pursue scientific inquiry in a less theoretically conservative way.

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Notes

  1. It is worth noting, however, that Godfrey-Smith’s “information flow” may not be an especially promising candidate here: as Zollman (2007, 2010) has shown, increasing information flow among the agents in an idealized scientific community increases the speed at which those communities converge on a single view but also increases the chances that such communities will reach premature consensus in favor of a mistaken or suboptimal view by excluding alternatives too quickly. This research is part of a rich literature concerning the social organization of scientific inquiry (including work by David Hull, Philip Kitcher, Michael Strevens, Miriam Solomon, and many others) that I will henceforth largely ignore. This tradition has tended to focus on questions about how to optimize or explain various aspects of our own scientific communities, while I am instead seeking to establish the epistemic consequences of the most important changes to those communities over the course of their history.

  2. There are, of course, exceptions to each of the extremely broad historical patterns I will describe, and the early professionalization of science in France is only one prominent example. In the present context, however, the most important point to keep in mind is that these are the exceptions to well-documented and widely recognized general historical patterns (here, that the professionalization of science occurred by and large in the middle decades of the nineteenth century). Most important for our purposes is a clear bird’s-eye view of the central features of the scientific terrain as a whole.

  3. Of course scientists routinely use money from one grant to support an embryonic research idea that is not yet funded, and often scientists actually write grant “proposals” for the research they have currently underway and then use the secured resources to support work on their next project. But so long as the grants must keep coming in, a researcher cannot afford to use the resources from the last successful grant proposal to support a new project that does not itself have a high probability of ultimately being funded by an extramural agency, or she risks having no source of support for the next project after that one. And of course, even if it is barely possible for scientists to conduct research that challenges existing theoretical orthodoxy in the interstices of their main research programs, it matters immensely if such research must indeed be pushed into the interstices.

  4. Indeed, the NIH is now considering whether or not to begin dedicating a substantial proportion of their resources to funding “people not projects” (Kaiser 2014).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge useful discussions concerning the material in this paper with Kevin Zollman, Penelope Maddy, Jeff Barrett, Pat Forber, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Steve Shapin, Fred Kronz, John Norton, Michael Weisberg, Jane Maienschein, Julia Bursten, Carole Lee, and Arash Pessian, and two anonymous referees for this journal, as well as audiences at the Durham University Conference on Unconceived Alternatives and Scientific Realism, the University of Vienna’s (Un)Conceived Alternatives Symposium, the University of Pittsburgh’s Conference on Choosing the Future of Science, Lingnan University’s ‘Science: The Real Thing?’ Conference, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Cambridge University, the University of Vienna, the University of Pennsylvania, UC San Diego, the University of Washington, the University of Western Ontario, the Pittsburgh Center for the Philosophy of Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Bloomsburg University, Indiana University, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the Australian National University. Parts of this paper were written while I was the Senior Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for the Philosophy of Science and while I was a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, and I gratefully acknowledge the support of both institutions.

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Stanford, P.K. Unconceived alternatives and conservatism in science: the impact of professionalization, peer-review, and Big Science. Synthese 196, 3915–3932 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0856-4

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