Abstract
Co-authorship of papers is very common in most areas of science, and it has increased as the complexity of research has strengthened the need for scientific collaboration. But the fact that papers have more than an author tends to complicate the attribution of merit to individual scientists. I argue that collaboration does not necessarily entail co-authorship, but that in many cases the latter is an option that individual authors might not choose, at least in principle: each author might publish in a separate way her own contribution to the collaborative project in which she has taken part, or papers could explicitly state what the contribution of each individual author has been. I ask, hence, why it is that scientists prefer to ‘pool’ their contributions instead of keeping them separate, if what they pursue in their professional careers (besides epistemic goals) is individual recognition. My answer is based on the view of the scientific paper as a piece of argumentation, following an inferentialist approach to scientific knowledge. A few empirical predictions from the model presented here are suggested in the conclusions.
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Notes
For a recent survey of social epistemology, see Goldman and Whitcomb (2010). Some other prominent examples in the application of social thinking to philosophy of science are Steve Fuller, David Hull, Philip Kitcher, Helen Longino, Joseph Rouse or Miriam Solomon.
Wagenknecht (2010) also presents an interesting empirical study of the relation of epistemic trust and joint commitment among collaborators.
Zamora Bonilla (2011).
One common complaint about this view of knowledge is that it does not explicitly refer to the idea of truth or objectivity; actually, it does it implicitly, as far as being committed to true claims, and to inferential norms that are truth-preserving and truth-tracking, is an epistemic goal for the agents themselves, though it is up to them (i.e., up to each particular community defined by some shared system of inferential norms) the task of finding out which ones those norms are, and what is their connection with epistemic and other types of goals, as well as what is the relative importance of the former as compared to that of the later. See Zamora Bonilla (2010) for a justification of the role of rationality and objectivity in the inferentialist approach to scientific knowledge.
See Hull (1988) for a convincing argument about this point.
See Zamora Bonilla (2002).
The argumentative character of the scientific paper, and my talk about ‘premises’ and ‘conclusions’, must not be confused with the stronger claim (which I do not endorse) that all scientific papers have something like a ‘deductive’ structure: deductive arguments are just one type of admissible arguments in science. What is important in the model defended here is the possibility of distinguishing within each paper the claims for which the authors want to be recognised, and the claims they employ as supporting the former. Take also into account that the fortune of a claim will hardly depend only on the support it receives from its author’s own works, but also from arguments and discussions provided by other scientists (e.g., Cavendish’s measure of the gravitation constant added support to the principles of Newton’s mechanics; Minkowski’s geometrical study of space-time added support to Einstein’s special relativity, etc.).
It is not essential that all scientist’s contributions have the linguistic form of a proposition; they can also be experimental or abstract technics, classifications, and even questions, or, of course, arguments themselves.
Of course, because of the nature of these actions, we don’t have enough empirical data to assess actual frequencies.
Another reason deterring scientists from this form of fraud might be that at least one of the fake co-authors thinks that her own paper deserves more merit that those of the others.
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Acknowledgments
I express my gratitude to Cyrille Imbert and the participants in the colloquium on “The collective dimension of science” (Nancy, 2011), to three anonymous referees, as well as to Beatrice Sasha Kobow for her hospitality during the writing of the first version of this paper. Financial support from Spanish Government’s research projects FFI2011-23267 and PR2011-0326 is also acknowledged.
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Zamora Bonilla, J. The nature of co-authorship: a note on recognition sharing and scientific argumentation. Synthese 191, 97–108 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0238-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0238-0