Abstract
A research community must share assumptions, such as about accepted knowledge, appropriate research practices, and good evidence. However, community members also hold some divergent assumptions, which they—and we, as analysts of science—tend to overlook. Communities with different assumed values, knowledge, and goals must negotiate to achieve compromises that make their conflicting goals complementary. This negotiation guards against the extremes of each group’s desired outcomes, which, if achieved, would make other groups’ goals impossible. I argue that this diversity, as a form of value pluralism, regularly influences scientific practice and can make scientific evidence and knowledge more useful and more reliable. As an example, I examine vertebrate paleontology laboratories, which house a variety of workers with different training and priorities, particularly about the meaning of time. Specifically, scientists want to study fully prepared fossils immediately, conservators want to preserve fossils for future use (such as by not preparing them), and preparators mediate between the other groups’ conflicting goals. After all, one cannot study a fossil encased in rock, and one cannot remove that rock without removing information from that specimen. In response, these coworkers articulate their assumptions in everyday deliberations about how scientific evidence should be made and used. I argue that this exchange of assumptions is crucial for a research community to achieve mutually beneficial compromises that benefit current and future knowledge construction.
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Notes
Other workers include collection managers, exhibit designers, and institutional administrators, all of whom deserve future attention but are beyond this paper’s scope. Vertebrate paleontology involves closer interaction between members of separate professions than do similar disciplines, such as invertebrate paleontology and paleoanthropology (which lack preparators because the scientists typically prepare the fossils), making it an especially illustrative example of inter-field collaboration. However, most sciences include a variety of people who manage collections, data, equipment, and/or institutions and who provide the kind of plurality that this paper traces.
For methodological details, see the section of this paper titled “How to study assumptions”.
Preparators rarely publish and there is no widely-used manual about their techniques. However, a group of preparators collected publications about preparation into an online bibliography (Bibliography 2019). In comparison, many conservators publish about their techniques and there are textbooks and manuals about conserving natural history specimens (see Reference Books 2019).
I refer to participants with pseudonyms.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Kate MacCord and Elizabeth Dobson Jones for editing this special issue, to Adrian Currie and Derek Taylor for comments on versions of this paper, and to two reviewers for insightful feedback.
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Wylie, C.D. The plurality of assumptions about fossils and time. HPLS 41, 21 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-019-0260-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-019-0260-3