Robert K. Merton, Norman W. Storer (Ed.) - The Sociology of Science - Theoretical and Empirical Investigations-University of Chicago Press (1979)
Robert K. Merton, Norman W. Storer (Ed.) - The Sociology of Science - Theoretical and Empirical Investigations-University of Chicago Press (1979)
Robert K. Merton, Norman W. Storer (Ed.) - The Sociology of Science - Theoretical and Empirical Investigations-University of Chicago Press (1979)
Sociology
of
Science
Robert K.
Merton
Edited and
with an Introduction by
Norman W. Storer
The
Sociology
of
Science
Theoretical and
Empirical
Investigations
4567
To my teachers
Pitirim A. Sorokin
Talcott Parsons
George Sarton
L. J. Henderson
A. N. Whitehead
who together formed
my interest in the
sociological study of
science
Contents
Author's Preface
ix
xt
The Sociology of
Scientific Knowledge
The Sociology of
Knowledge
Prefatory Note
1.
2.
3.
Prefatory Note
139
6.
7.
8.
9.
4.
5.
viii
Contents
PrefatoryNote
223
Prefatory Note
281
The Processes of
Evaluation in Science
Prefatory Note
415
561
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
577
587
Author's Preface
Reiteration would only dull the thanks I express in the individual papers
to the many who have helped me get on with my work in this field. But
there are other, current debts. I thank Richard Lewis for help in reading
the proofs of this book, and Mary Miles and Hedda Garza for preparing
the index. I owe special thanks to my colleagues Bernard Barber, Harriet
Zuckerman, and Richard Lewis for allowing me to reprint our joint
papers, and to Elinor Barber for allowing me to draw upon our published
and unpublished collaborative work. I gladly acknowledge the help given
me by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, by a term as Visiting Scholar of the Russell Sage Foundation and,
more recently, by a grant from the National Science Foundation in support of the Columbia University Program in the Sociology of Science.
I, for one, must testify to the growing worth of that program as I agreeably observe that my colleagues in it-Harriet Zuckerman, Stephen Cole,
and Jonathan Cole-have come to teach me increasingly more than I
have ever been capable of teaching them. I have also benefitted much
from the thought and friendship of William J. Goode since those distant
days when we first worked together in the sociology of the professions.
And in this latest retrospect, I discover once again how much I have
learned from Paul F. Lazarsfeld, in joint seminars, in other joint ventures
and, most of all, from our continuing dialogue through the years.
R. K. M.
Introduction
By Norman W. Storer
xii
Introduction
As a sociological specialty, the field has come alive only in the past
fifteen years or so; the upward turn in the logistic curve describing its
growth (which we know is typical of new, "hot" specialties in many fields
of science) began in the mid-fifties. It would perhaps be a sign of premature senility, or at least of the flattening of the S-shaped curve, for any
new field other than the sociology of science to begin so early to examine
its own development. But this field has the peculiar character of being grist
for its own mill. Yesterday's achievements-and failures-are data for
today's research on the growth of scientific specialties, as is the case with
no other specialized discipline. This unique property carries its own hazards. Too much thinking about one's own thinking can produce intellectual
stasis; too much questioning of one's own questions can produce a kind
of sociological anomie. Yet such difficulties can scarcely be allowed to
dissuade us from trying to understand the character and development of
this special field.
The papers collected her~ are intended to serve several purposes. Primarily, the volume brings together a number of articles that have been of
central significance in the development of the sociology of science, together
with others which are representative of certain stages in that process. At
the same time, the collection may provide a sense of the intellectual continuity and coherence of the field; more clearly here than in some other
fields of sociology, the seeds of future growth can be readily found in
papers antedating this growth by ten years and more. In a more practical
vein, enclosing these papers drawn from many different sources within a
single cover will afford easy access to them for those wanting to make use
of them in their own work. Finally, the collection pays tribute to the
author; the substance and style of the papers themselves record, in a way
mere panegyric could not, the enduring importance of his work.
The papers are not presented in strictly chronological order. The warp
and woof of the entire corpus is drawn so tight-the intersections of different threads of thought are so frequent-that it has seemed better to
separate and group the major elements in this mosaic for concentrated
attention than to leave the task entirely to the reader. It is hoped that in
this way the continued clarification of ideas and the ways they have been
woven together to give added strength to this growing body of knowledge
will be made more visible.
But the papers themselves, even with the extensive footnoting that has
been characteristic of Merton's work since the beginning, cannot provide
full perspective on the larger scene-the social and intellectual context
within which they have been produced and to which they have contributed.
It is the aim of this introduction to supply such perspective from the vantage point of 1973, aiming not at anything like a history of the sociology
of science but rather at sketching the major landmarks and problems that
Introduction
xiii
have provided its broad outlines. Additional detail will be found in the
prefatory notices to each of the five parts of the volume.
The sociology of science is sometimes defined as a part of the sociology
of knowledge, and yet the multifaceted problem of the relations between
knowledge and reality (not to speak of the reality of knowledge) is a more
general one, at the heart of the larger part of sociology. Studies of religion
and ideology, of the mass media and public opinion, and of norms and
values, to say nothing of the methodological concerns of sociologists, all
implicate the chicken-and-egg question of the interdependence of these
two fundamental components of human life in groups. How do existential,
everyday experiences mold the ways in which people conceptualize the
world? How, in tum, do their conceptualizations influence their actions
in the world, and how, further, do they react to discrepancies between
what they "know" and what they experience?
It is perhaps because Wissenssoziologie, the sociology of knowledge, in
a sense defined its concerns so narrowly in the beginning, focusing almost
exclusively on trying to reason out the extent to which men's knowledge
is shaped by their interests and experiences, that it had fallen into disarray
by the 1930s. Indeed, as Merton's examination of the field in 1945 (included here as "Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge") demonstrates,
this particular question contained within itself the petard by which it would
eventually be hoist. To conclude that knowledge is not at all molded by
men's experiences would undermine the raison d'etre of the field, while to
conclude that it is altogether so molded would seem tantamount to questioning, if not denying, the validity of all knowledge-including that
conclusion. This restricted construction of the problem led to a maze of
internal contradictions, a cul-de-sac from which escape had to be sought
by beginning anew with different questions.
Such questions were, of course, vigorously pursued in different sectors
of the sociological community. Weber's work on the importance of the
Protestant Weltanschauung in producing capitalism in Europe had already
had a long and effectively controversial history by the time Merton saw its
relevance to his interest in the history of science. Durkheim's work on
primitive religion and his orientation to problems in the sociology of knowledge was beginning to attract the notice even of some American sociologists. The task was to put the various problems back into some sort of
orderly array.
In the early 1930s, however, Merton's interest was not primarily in the
sociology of knowledge. During his graduate studies at Harvard, he undertook, at the suggestion of the economic historian E. F. Gay, an analytical
book review of A. P. Usher's History of Mechanical Invention. Gay liked
it and suggested that George Sarton, also at Harvard, publish it in Isis,
the prime journal in the history of science which he had founded and still
xiv
Introduction
edited. Sarton did so, and he encouraged Merton's interest in the history
of science by having him work in the renowned workshop in Widener
Library. Noting his growing expertise in this field, Pitirim A. Sorokin
recruited Merton to assist him in the studies of the development of science
that would make up parts of his Social and Cultural Dynamics. This provided valuable experience in focusing on the development of quantitative
measures of intellectual development and change, and perhaps paved the
way to "prosopography"-"the study of the common background characteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of
their lives" 3-which Merton was to employ extensively in his later work.
Merton also studied with L. J. Henderson, the biochemist who had made
a place for Sarton at Harvard and who was himself a gifted teacher of the
history of science. 4 He attended the course of lectures in the philosophy
of science given by Alfred North Whitehead and the unique course on
comparative "animal sociology" in which specialists on a score of social
species were brought together by William Morton Wheeler, the dean of
entomologists whose omnivorous intellectual appetite included the history
of science. And his early work on social aspects of science was monitored
by the polymath E. B. Wilson, then associated with the new department
of sociology. Merton was thus responding to the many opportunities at
Harvard to develop various perspectives on science by going beyond the
conventional boundaries of sociology, even though he continued in the department to be the student of Sorokin and, increasingly, of the young
instructor, Talcott Parsons.
It was apparently this confluence of varied intellectual currents, rather
than immediate developments in the sociology of knowledge, that led
Merton to attempt a sociological analysis of the growth and development
of science and that laid the foundation for his continuing interest in science
as a distinctive social activity. Not that he was at this time unconcerned
with the broader conceptual framework in which science could be located.
Two papers5 testify to this wider theoretical orientation. In 1935 he published in Isis a review of recent work in the sociology of knowledge by
Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, Alexander von Schelting, and Ernst GrUnwald. In the next year he published "Civilization and Culture," a paper
that located knowledge as a distinct focus of sociological interest in rela3. For an account of Merton's role in this development, see Lawrence Stone,
"Prosopography," Daedalus 100 (1971): 46-79.
4. For an account of Henderson's role in sociology, see the introduction to L. J.
Henderson, On the Social System: Selected Writings, ed. and with an introduction by
Bernard Barber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); for an account of
Sarton's role in shaping the history of science, see Arnold Thackray and Robert K.
Merton, "On Discipline-Building: The Paradoxes of George Sarton," Isis 63 (1972):
473-95.
5. The Bibliography lists all of Merton's writings cited here.
Introduction
xv
xvi
Introduction
Introduction
xvii
oped by Edward Shils in the 1950s, and became a basic conception in the
sociology of science in the 1960sP
Recently, it should be noted, there has been renewed observation that
the nature and direction of scientific growth cannot be adequately understood without dealing specifically with the contents of science-its concepts, data, theories, paradigms, and methods. The idea that the development of science can be analyzed at all effectively, apart from the concrete
research of scientists, is said to have proven false. 14 The study of science,
after all, begins with its product, scientific knowledge, rather than simply
with those individuals who occupy the social position of "scientist." (This,
incidentally, may account for the dearth of sociological studies focused
on run-of-the-mill or relatively unproductive scientists: so long as science
is defined by its research product, those who contribute little directly to
that product are difficult to fit into the picture.)
Regarding the strategy of inquiry, however, it can be argued rather
forcefully that it is of basic importance, especially in the beginning of
sociological inquiry into the subject, to distinguish the behavior of scientists as scientists from the details of their "output"-if only to attend to
the diverse aspects of doing science and to reduce the number of variables
being considered at a given time. A comparable strategy is in fact employed by Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions/ 5
except that there the focus is on the formal organization of scientific
knowledge and it is the social variables that need to be successively identified. Sociologically, it was necessary to identify the boundaries of the
scientific community and to explore the bases of its place within society
before the sociology of science could proceed to a range of other problems.
(Indeed, the question of why science becomes established in any society,
when most people can neither profit directly from the work of scientists
nor comprehend and appreciate what they are doing, forms the central
problem to which Joseph Ben-David addresses himself in his recent book
on The Scientist's Role in Society. 16 )
13. Polanyi's early paper of 1942, "Self-Government of Science," is included in his
collection of essays, The Logic of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1951 ), pp. 49-67; the general idea is developed in his many later books (see, for
example, Personal Knowledge [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958]). Edward
Shils, "Scientific Community: Thoughts After Hamburg," Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists 10 (1954): 1151-55, reprinted in Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the
Powers, Selected Papers, vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp.
204-12. The developments in the 1960s are considered later in this introduction.
14. See, for instance, Barnes and Dolby, "The Scientific Ethos"; Mulkay, "Some
Aspects of Cultural Growth"; and M. D. King, "Reason, Tradition, and the Progressiveness of Science," History and Theory 10 (1971): 3-32.
15. Second ed., enlarged (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
16. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971.
xviii
Introduction
While there is no clear sign that Merton was then fully aware of the
need for such a strategy, it does now seem that it was critically important
to establish the relevance of distinctively sociological analyses to the study
of science if the field were to develop at all. The social structure of an
institution and the general orientations that characterize its participants,
after all, can be separated from the specific concerns and activities that
occupy their attention during particular periods of time. Thus, to take an
analogous case, we assume that the central dynamics of public opinion
are the same, whether its substantive focus is a war, an economic situation,
a religious revival, or a fad.
Having explored the problematics of scientific knowledge in his monograph, with particular attention to the social as well as intellectual sources
of foci of investigation in science, Merton evidently became persuaded
that further sociological analysis required a more systematic conception of
the social structure of science. It is significant that his early (1935) paper
with Sorokin, "The Course of Arabian Intellectual Development, 7001300 A.D.," is subtitled "A Study in Method." The fact was that without a
sufficiently well-developed model of the social structure of science, there
was no way to generate theoretically important questions that could use
systematic data on scientific development to advantage. A research method
is not much use if it cannot be coupled with theoretical questions (even
though it may, through producing certain kinds of new data, encourage
the subsequent development of theory).
So the decision was made, or perhaps evolved, to concentrate on the
social structure of science rather than to continue with study of the social
contexts that influence its substantive output of knowledge. The first phase
of this work appeared in 1942 with the publication of "A Note on Science
and Democracy" (reprinted here under the more appropriate title, "The
Normative Structure of Science"). In this paper appeared the comprehensive statement of ideal norms to which scientists are oriented in their
relations with each other: universalism, communism, organized skepticism,
and disinterestedness.
Widely adopted as it has been, Merton's description of the "ethos of
science" has not, it should be remarked, met with universal acceptance
over the thirty years since its publication. Criticism, however, has been
concentrated not so much on its having mistaken the components of this
ethos, but on the question whether these norms in fact guide scientists'
everyday behavior. No one has come forward with a radically different
set of norms, but various critics have pointed out that scientists frequently
violate one or more of the indicated norms. Thus, the treatment of the
controversial Immanuel Velikovsky by members of the "scientific establishment" in the early 1950s is the one case repeatedly cited as an instance
of widespread defection from the norms of universalism and disinterested-
Introduction
xix
ness. 17 There have been scattered attempts to measure the extent of commitment among scientists to the norms identified by Merton. The most
recent of these, although its conclusions are limited by imperfect operationalization of some of these norms, finds substantial orientation to them
in a sample of nearly a thousand American scientists, the extent of this
varying somewhat by scientific discipline, scientific role, and organizational
affiliation of scientists. 18
It is, of course, the case that the behavior of scientists does not invariably adhere to the norms. But the implication sometimes drawn from this
fact that the norms are therefore irrelevant stems from a misapprehension
of the ways in which social norms operate. The theoretical problem is one
of identifying the conditions under which behavior tends to conform to
norms or to depart from them and to make for their change. Norms of this
sort are associated primarily with a social role, so that even when they
have been internalized by individuals, they come into play primarily in
those situations in which the role is being performed and socially supported. When scientists are aware that their colleagues are oriented to
these same norms-and know that these provide effective and legitimate
rules for interaction in "routine" scientific situations-their behavior is the
more likely to accord with them. These routine situations occur most
frequently within an accepted universe of discourse, or paradigm; when
there is general agreement on the ground-rules of the game (for example,
basic concepts and problems, criteria of validity, etc.), acting in terms of
the rules becomes personally rewarding and reinforces institutional bases
for the development of knowledge. It is when such a universe of discourse
is only slightly developed (as during the Kuhnian "pre-paradigm" stage
in the development of a new discipline or during a "scientific revolution"),
or when group loyalties outside the domain of science take over, that
violations of the norms become more frequent, leading some to reject the
norms entirely.
This analysis puts us somewhat ahead in the discussion of the development of the sociology of science, bringing in as it does explicit attention
to the content of science (even though not at the level of specific data or
theories). It was not until the late 1960s that the tactical advantages to be
gained from drawing a sharp distinction between the social structure of
science and its specific substantive output had been realized-the sociology
of science had become established by then-and the time was ripe to pay
17. Alfred de Grazia, ed., The Velikovsky Affair (New York: University Books,
1966).
18. Marian Blissett, Politics in Science (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1972),
pp. 65-89, appendixes A, B, and C. An exploratory study by S. Stewart West ("The
Ideology of Academic Scientists," IRE Transactions on Engineering Management
EM-7 [1960]: 54-62) could be only suggestive at best, since it was based on responses
from only fifty-seven scientists in one American university.
xx
Introduction
attention once more to the reciprocal relations between the social structure
of science and scientific knowledge. The point will be taken up in more
detail below.
Following the 1942 paper on the norms of science, there was a hiatus
of about seven years in Merton's publications in the sociology of science,
strictly conceived 19-and there were few major contributions to the field
from anyone else until 1952, when Bernard Barber's influential Science
and the Social Order was published (with a foreword of considerable interest by Merton). Well before then, however, he had identified science
as a special focus of interest within the sociology of knowledge. Certainly
his analysis of Mannheim's work in "Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of
Knowledge," appearing in 1941, exhibits intensive study of the topic,
which was to lead to his more comprehensive discussion of the entire field
in 1945 (reprinted here as "Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge").
Indeed, his interest in the social matrix of knowledge can be traced further
back, to an article on "social time" published with Sorokin in 1937, which
explores the question of how social processes influence the concepts and
measurement of time.
The paper on Mannheim highlighted a number of unresolved difficulties
in the study of how (and to what extent) existential conditions shape
men's "knowledge" (which, for Mannheim, often seemed to include "every
type of assertion and every mode of thought from folkloristic maxims to
rigorous science"), but concluded with the courteous expectation that
much enlightenment would be forthcoming from Mannheim's further explorations of the subject.
By 1945 Merton's dissatisfaction with the field was more clearly evident,
and he undertook to chart some new directions through which further
progress might be possible. It was at this point, too, that a separate chain
of interests, also dating back to his years at Harvard, began to link with
his interest in the sociology of knowledge. He had already worked with
the general idea that available knowledge involves specifiable gaps in
coping with social reality, developing it in various ways through his discussion in "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action"
(1936), through the seminal paper "Social Structure and Anomie" (1938),
19. During this period, however, Merton did deal with various problems and conceptions relating to the sociology of science. For example: "The Role of the Intellectual in Public Bureaucracy" (1945), dealing with organizational constraints on policyoriented knowledge; "The Machine, the Worker and the Engineer" (1947), treating
the problem of the "rationalized abdication of social responsibilities" by technologists; "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" ( 1948), with its implications for social epistemology; "Election Polling Forecasts and Public Images of Social Science" (with
Paul Hatt, 1949), examining a special case of failed claims to knowledge affecting
the public standing of science; and "Patterns of Influence" (1949), with its concepts
of local and cosmopolitan influentials.
Introduction
xxi
and through the concept of latent dysfunctions. Although the topic could
be viewed as a distinctive problem within the sociology of knowledge, it
obviously had implications far beyond those evident in contemporary
"mainstream" works in the field.
The next several years were a kind of harvest-time during which Merton
brought to fruition a number of related interests-disparate though they
may have appeared to others. Apart from his continuing codification of
functional analysis during this period, which provided the theoretical background for his empirical interests, Merton was evidently centrally concerned with the various relationships that may exist between "knowledge"
and "reality," and he worked on several subjects that served as what
he describes as "strategic research sites" for the investigation of these
relationships.
Studies in public opinion and personal influence, carried out with Paul
F. Lazarsfeld in the Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia
University, fitted in directly with the 1945 paradigm: the question of the
social bases of knowledge was operationalized in empirical research on
sources of people's decision-oriented knowledge. At the same time, exceptions to the postulate of "class-based consciousness" could be studied in
the relationships between group membership and attitudes and could be
partly accounted for in terms of a developing reference group theory. 20
The problem of how a member of the bourgeoisie could develop an active
concern for the rights of the proletariat, for example, or how a member
of the proletariat could maintain a "false consciousness" all his life, had
been a major stumbling block in attempts to identify the social bases of
knowledge; but once it was reconceptualized in terms of reference groups,
it became amenable to systematic research.
March and Simon21 have traced what they describe as the "Merton
model" of bureaucracy focused on unanticipated organizational consequences as it was substantially developed in a series of outstanding empirical studies by graduates of the Columbia department (Selznick, Gouldner,
Blau, Lipset, Trow, and Coleman). This model provided opportunity to
wrestle with the problems that appear when "knowledge" (in this case,
as exhibited in the formal structure and goals of a bureaucracy) is given
and organizational "reality" (empirical patterns of interaction within the
bureaucracy) becomes the dependent variable. Here social reality is adjusting (and reacting) to knowledge-in contrast to science, where knowledge must eventually be adjusted to fit reality.
20. See, for instance, Robert K. Merton and Alice S. Rossi, "Contributions to the
Theory of Reference Group Behavior," and Robert K. Merton, "Continuities in the
Theory of Reference Groups and Social Structure."
21. James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (New York: Wiley,
1958), chapter 3.
xxii
Introduction
Introduction
xxiii
xxiv
Introduction
Introduction
xxv
xxvi
Introduction
Introduction
xxvii
was not until these patterns were seen as fundamental to the development
of new scientific specialties and not until the latent functions of planned
communication came into focus that an explicit linkage was formed. 33
Crane's Invisible Colleges 34 brings the two interests together very effectively, and Nicholas C. Mullins' 1966 dissertation at Harvard, "Social
Networks Among Biological Scientists," represents an independent approach to the problem. 35
Another important source of information on the flow of communication
in science was the American Psychological Association's project on communication among psychologists. This developed an extensive array of
data during the 1960s, under the direction of William Garvey and Belver
C. Griffith. Garvey then moved to Johns Hopkins, where the Center for
Research in Scientific Communication undertook a notable series of studies
of communication during and after the annual meetings of a number of
scientific and technological associations. 36 These studies tended to be long
on data and relatively short on theory, but they have proven to be quite
compatible with questions derived from the paradigm. Griffith, now at
the Drexel Institute, has also continued to study the communications and
invisible colleges of scientists.
Three additional lines of development in the United States, largely independent of the Mertonian tradition and yet generally complementary,
should be noted here. Joseph Ben-David, working partly at Chicago and
partly at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has produced since 1960 a
series of important papers on the relation of different forms of academic
organization to scientific developments, culminating in his recent important analysis of the growth of science in Western civilization since the time
33. Herbert Menzel, "The Flow of Information Among Scientists: Problems, Opportunities, and Research Questions," mimeographed (New York: Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research, 1958). On the functions of various
patterns of communication, see Herbert Menzel, "Planned and Unplanned Scientific
Communication," in International Conference on Scientific Information, Proceedings
(Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1959), pp. 199-243. See also,
Menzel, "Scientific Communication: Five Themes from Social Research," American
Psychologist 21 (1966): 999-1004, and for other aspects of the communication
process, the other papers in the same issue of this journal.
34. Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
35. For example, see Nicholas C. Mullins, "The Distribution of Social and Cultural Properties in Informal Communication Networks among Biological Scientists,"
American Sociological Review 33 (October 1968): 786-97.
36. See, for example, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Research in Scientific Communication, "Scientific Exchange-Behavior at the 1966 Annual Meeting
of the American Sociological Association," report no. 4, Baltimore, September 1967,
pp. 209-50; and "The Dissemination of Scientific Information, Informal Interaction,
and the Impact of Information Associated with the 48th Annual Meeting of the
American Geophysical Union," report no. 5, Baltimore, October 1967, pp. 251-92.
xxviii
Introduction
Introduction
xxix
xxx
Introduction
ogy." Others are at work in the field at Leeds (J. R. Ravetz and R. G. A.
Dolby), at Cambridge (N. J. Mulkay), at London (Hilary Rose), at
Cardiff (Paul Halmos), and at Manchester (Richard D. Whitley).
In Sweden, Stevan Dedijer has assembled a research group at the University of Lund. Considerable interest in the sociology of science exists in
the Soviet Union as A. Zvorikin and S. R. Mikulinskii, among others,
testify, with the work of Gennady Dobrov at Kiev being along the lines
developed by Derek Price in this country. Increasing interest in the field
has been evidenced by social scientists in Poland, where years ago, in the
mid-1930s, Maria Ossowka and Stanislaw Ossowski introduced the "science
of science"; in Czechoslovakia where the Academy of Sciences has coordinated disciplinary work on the social and human implications of
science and technology; in France, in the work of such men as JeanJacques Salomon, Serge Moscovici, and Bernard Lecuyer (whose work in
the sociology of science, chiefly under the guidance of Paul Lazarsfeld,
began in a joint seminar given by Lazarsfeld and Merton); and in Germany, Israel, Holland, Japan, and an array of other countries. A number of
important investigations have been carried out by UNESCO and the Union
Intemationale d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences in Paris, and a
Research Committee on the Sociology of Science has been established by
the International Sociological Association. Any comprehensive survey of
the present state of the sociology of science that examined the contributions
of these groups would surely conclude that it is becoming less and less an
American specialty.
Since the emergence of the Mertonian paradigm in the early 1960s,
most research in the field appears to fit Kuhn's definition of "normal science." Not only Merton's own work but that of many others in the field
have focused primarily on problems which, once elucidated, tum out to be
directly relevant to questions explicit or implicit in the paradigm. In short,
the sociology of science has matured to the point where much research
involves "puzzle-solving." As Kuhn emphasizes,40 to describe research as
"puzzle-solving" does not imply that it falls short of being imaginative,
satisfying, or important. Filling out the areas which a paradigm can only
identify-what Merton has described as "specified ignorance"-is as
necessary to the development of scientific knowledge as is the scientific
revolution; without the yin of normal science, there would be no basis for
the yang of scientific revolution-and the latter is comparatively rare.
As the five divisions of this volume indicate, several fundamental questions generated by the paradigm have led to substantial research. For
example, the effort to work out a comprehensive concept of the reward
system in science-in part by intensively investigating the meanings in40. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, chapter 4.
Introduction
xxxi
volved in the quest for priority-helped to focus attention on how professional recognition is achieved in science and to indicate how the reward
system is linked to the normative structure. Further related to this line
of investigation are the social organization and processes of evaluation
that are seen as central to science as an intellectual enterprise. This leads
to research on such empirical problems as the ways in which the quality
of scientific contributions is assessed and the general adequacy or inadequacy of this process in facilitating the equitable allocation of rewards
for these contributions. Finally, as we have seen, problems of this sort
have led to closer scrutiny of the criteria by which scientific excellence is
determined and to an explicit consideration of the intellectual variables
involved: the degree of consensus that exists in a given discipline and
several aspects of the organization of its body of knowledge.
There is no completely satisfactory way to close this introduction, for
the field described here which Merton and others have thus far advanced
is still in a stage of rapid expansion. Presented here are many of the
foundation stones of the sociology of science as it is presently constituted,
together with numerous examples of work on questions built upon this
foundation. One of the facts that is lost when one categorizes all science
as "normal" or "revolutionary," however, is that the shape of the paradigms-the facets prominent at a given time-changes as "normal" questions are solved and new ones take their place. Such changes hardly
constitute a revolution, any more than the invasion of a new type of tree
changes the essential character of a forest, but those of us in the midst of
the forest may look forward to different foci of attention and to different
research methods and data as this particular forest continues to flourish.
For all of this, the enduring value of the papers collected here cannot
be mistaken. It will be several decades at least before the Whiteheadian
maxim, "A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost," has any
relevance at all to the sociology of science-and the editor mentions this
only as a bet-hedging counter to his own conviction that these papers will
not lose their basic value so long as the perspectives of sociology are
applied to any science, including itself.
NORMAN
W.
STORER
The
Sociology of
Knowledge
Part
Prefatory Note
The five papers comprising part one
delineate Merton's continuing interest in the sociology of knowledge,
and the dates of their appearance
attest to the fruitful reciprocity
between work in that field and in
the sociology of science. Since
"knowledge" is more inclusive than
"scientific knowledge," the latter
must constitute the more specialized
focus of attention; one conclusion
that can be drawn from these (and
other) papers is that Merton has
been at pains since the first of his
work to keep the distinction aud
connection between the two explicit
and analytically useful.
The papers are arranged here,
without regard for chronology, to
trace a line of thought that extends
from a concern with pure theory
to a vivid awareness of the concrete
moral dilemmas faced by individual
men aud women of knowledge.
After all, it is not often the case
that scholars and scientists see,
from the outset, all of the phases
in a developing line of reasoning
and then focus on each one in logical
sequence. Rather, the stages are
''filled in" as occasion aud opportunity allow, and it is the task of
hindsight to discern the underlying
order that knits them together.
The section begins with Merton's
examination of the condition of
the sociology of knowledge circa
1945, in which he argues that its
fixation on the one problem of
the "existential basis of mental
Prefatory Note
Paradigm
for the
Sociology of
Knowledge
1945
infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may
be called 'sciences as one would.' " And Nietzsche had set down a host of
aphorisms on the ways in which needs determined the perspectives through
which we interpret the world so that even sense perceptions are permeated
with value-preferences. The antecedents of Wissenssoziologie only go to
support Whitehead's observation that "to come very near to a true theory,
and to grasp its precise application, are two very different things, as the
history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said
before by somebody who did not discover it."
The Social Context
Quite apart from its historical and intellectual origins, there is the further
question of the basis of contemporary interest in the sociology of knowledge. As is well known, the sociology of knowledge, as a distinct discipline,
has been especially cultivated in Germany and France. Only within the
last decades have American sociologists come to devote increasing attention
to problems in this area. The growth of publications and, as a decisive test
of its academic respectability, the increasing number of doctoral dissertations in the field partly testify to this rise of interest.
An immediate and obviously inadequate explanation of this development
would point to the recent transfer of European sociological thought by
sociologists who have lately come to this country. To be sure, these scholars
were among the culture-bearers of Wissenssoziologie. But this merely
provided availability of these conceptions and no more accounts for their
actual acceptance than would mere availability in any other instance of
culture diffusion. American thought proved receptive to the sociology of
knowledge largely because it dealt with problems, concepts, and theories
that are increasingly pertinent to our contemporary social situation, because our society has come to have certain characteristics of those European societies in which the discipline was initially developed.
The sociology of knowledge takes on pertinence under a definite complex
of social and cultural conditions. 2 With increasing social conflict, differences in the values, attitudes, and modes of thought of groups develop to
the point where the orientation which these groups previously had in
common is overshadowed by incompatible differences. Not only do there
develop distinct universes of discourse, but the existence of any one
universe challenges the validity and legitimacy of the others. The coexistence of these conflicting perspectives and interpretations within the
same society leads to an active and reciprocal distrust between groups.
2. See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 5-12; Pitirim A. Sorokin, Social
and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols. (New York: American Book Co., 1937), 2: 412-13.
10
these contexts to refer to beliefs, ideas, and thought: vital lies, myths,
illusions, derivations, folklore, rationalizations, ideologies, verbal fa~ade,
pseudo-reasons, and so on.
What these schemes of analysis have in common is the practice of
discounting the face value of statements, beliefs, and idea-systems by
reexamining them within a new context which supplies the "real meaning."
Statements ordinarily viewed in terms of their manifest content are debunked, whatever the intention of the analyst, by relating this content to
attributes of the speaker or of the society in which he lives. The professional iconoclast, the trained debunker, the ideological analyst and their
respective systems of thought thrive in a society where large groups of
people have already become alienated from common values; where separate
universes of discourse are linked with reciprocal distrust. Ideological
analysis systematizes the lack of faith in reigning symbols which has
become widespread; hence its pertinence and popularity. The ideological
analyst does not so much create a following as he speaks for a following
to whom his analyses "make sense," that is, conform to their previously
unanalyzed experience. 4
In a society where reciprocal distrust finds such folk-expression as
"what's in it for him?"; where "buncombe" and "bunk" have been idiom
for nearly a century and "debunk" for a generation; where advertising and
propaganda have generated active resistance to the acceptance of statements at face-value; where pseudo-Gemeinschaft behavior as a device for
improving one's economic and political position is documented in a best
seller on how to win friends who may be influenced; where social relationships are increasingly instrumentalized so that the individual comes to
view others as seeking primarily to control, manipulate, and exploit him;
where growing cynicism involves a progressive detachment from significant
group relationships and a considerable degree of self-estrangement; where
uncertainty about one's own motives is voiced in the indecisive phrase,
"I may be rationalizing, but . . . "; where defenses against traumatic
disillusionment may consist in remaining permanently disillusioned by
reducing expectations about the integrity of others through discounting
their motives and abilities in advance;-in such a society, systematic
ideological analysis and a derived sociology of knowledge take on a
4. The concept of pertinence was assumed by the Marxist harbingers of Wissenssoziologie. "The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on
ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be
universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, the actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our
very eyes" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Karl
Marx, Selected Works, 2 vols. [Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society, 1935], 1:
219 [italics added]).
11
12
13
14
15
special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions through which
alone modem society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little
must one imagine that the democratic representatives are all shopkeepers or
are full of enthusiasm for them. So far as their education and their individual
position are concerned, they may be as widely separated from them as heaven
from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeosie is the
fact that in their minds [im Kopfe] they do not exceed the limits which the latter
do not exceed in their life activities, that they are consequently driven to the
same problems and solutions in theory to which material interest and social
position drive the latter in practice. This is ueberhaupt, the relationship of the
political and literary representatives of a class to the class which they represent. 8
But if we cannot derive ideas from the objective class position of their
exponents, this leaves a wide margin of indeterminacy. It then becomes a
further problem to discover why some identify themselves with the characteristic outlook of the class stratum in which they objectively find themselves whereas others adopt the presuppositions of a class stratum other
than "their own." An empirical description of the fact is no adequate
substitute for its theoretical explanation.
In dealing with existential bases, Max Scheler characteristically places
his own hypothesis in opposition to other prevalent theories. 9 He draws
a distinction between cultural sociology and what he calls the sociology
of real factors (Realsoziologie). Cultural data are "ideal," in the realm of
ideas and values: "real factors" are oriented toward effecting changes in
the reality of nature or society. The former are defined by ideal goals or
intentions; the latter derive from an "impulse structure" (Triebstruktur,
for example, sex, hunger, power) . It is a basic error, he holds, of all
naturalistic theories to maintain that real factors-whether race, geopolitics, political power structure, or the relations of economic production
-unequivocally determine the realm of meaningful ideas. He also rejects
all ideological, spiritualistic, and personalistic conceptions which err in
viewing the history of existential conditions as a unilinear unfolding of the
history of mind. He ascribes complete autonomy and a determinate sequence to these real factors, though he inconsistently holds that valueladen ideas serve to guide and direct their development. Ideas as such
initially have no social effectiveness. The "purer" the idea, the greater its
8. Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (Hamburg, 1885),
p. 36 (italics inserted).
9. This account is based upon Max Scheler's most elaborate discussion, "Probleme
einer Soziologie des Wissens," in his Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Leipzig: Der Neue-Geist Verlag, 1926), pp. 1-229. This essay is an extended and improved version of an essay in his Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens (Munich:
Duncker und Humblot, 1924), pp. 5-146. For further discussions of Scheler, seeP. A.
Schillp, "The Formal Problems of Scheler's Sociology of Knowledge," The Philosophical Review 36 (March 1927): 101-20; Howard Becker and H. Otto Dahlke,
"Max Scheler's Sociology of Knowledge," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (March 1942): 310-22.
16
17
-generations, status groups, sects, occupational groups-and their characteristic modes of thought that there can be found an existential basis
corresponding to the great variety of perspectives and knowledge which
actually obtain. 12
Though representing a different tradition, this is substantially the position taken by Durkheim. In an early study with Mauss of primitive forms
of classification, he maintained that the genesis of the categories of thought
is to be found in the group structure and relations and that the categories
vary with changes in the social organization. 13 In seeking to account for
the social origins of the categories, Durkheim postulates that individuals
are more directly and inclusively oriented toward the groups in which they
live than they are toward nature. The primarily significant experiences are
mediated through social relationships, which leave their impress on the
character of thought and knowledge. 14 Thus, in his study of primitive forms
of thought, he deals with the periodic recurrence of social activities (ceremonies, feasts, rites), the clan structure, and the spatial configurations of
group meetings as among the existential bases of thought. And, applying
Durkheim's formulations to ancient Chinese thought, Granet attributes
their typical conceptions of time and space to such bases as the feudal
organization and the rhythmic alternation of concentrated and dispersed
group life. 15
In sharp distinction from the foregoing conceptions of existential bases
is Sorokin's idealistic and emanationist theory, which seeks to derive every
aspect of knowledge, not from an existential social basis, but from varying
"culture mentalities." These mentalities are constructed of "major premises": thus, the ideational mentality conceives of reality as "non-material,
ever-lasting Being"; its needs as primarily spiritual and their full satisfaction through "self imposed minimization or elimination of most physical
needs." 16 Contrariwise, the sensate mentality limits reality to what can be
perceived through the senses, it is primarily concerned with physical needs
which it seeks to satisfy to a maximum, not through self-modification, but
12. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 247-48. In view of the recent extensive discussions of Mannheim's work, it will not be treated at length in this essay.
13. Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, "De quelques formes primitives de
classification," L'Annee Sociologique 6 (1901-2): 1-72: " ... even ideas as abstract
as those of time and space are, at each moment of their history, in close relation with
the corresponding social organization." As Marcel Granet has indicated, this paper
contains some pages on Chinese thought which have been held by specialists to mark
a new era in the field of sinological studies.
14. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, pp. 443-44;
see also Hans Kelsen, Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1943), p. 30.
15. Marcel Granet, La pensee chinoise (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1934),
for example, pp. 84-104.
16. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 1: 72-73.
18
through change of the external world. The chief intermediate type of mentality is the idealistic, which represents a virtual balance of the foregoing
types. It is these mentalities, that is, the major premises of each culture,
from which systems of truth and knowledge are derived. And here we
come to the self-contained emanationism of an idealistic position: it appears plainly tautological to say, as Sorokin does, that "in a sensate society
and culture the Sensate system of truth based upon the testimony of the
organs of senses has to be dominant." 17 For sensate mentality has already
been defined as one conceiving of "reality as only that which is presented
to the sense organs." 18
Moreover, an emanationist phrasing such as this bypasses some of the
basic questions raised by other approaches to the analysis of existential
conditions. Thus, Sorokin considers the failure of the sensate "system of
truth" (empiricism) to monopolize a sensate culture as evidence that the
culture is not "fully integrated." But this surrenders inquiry into the bases
of those very differences of thought with which our contemporary world
is concerned. This is true of other categories and principles of knowledge
for which he seeks to apply a sociological accounting. For example, in our
present sensate culture, he finds that "materialism" is less prevalent than
"idealism," and that "temporalism" and "eternalism" are almost equally current; so, too, with "realism" and "nominalism," "singularism" and "universalism," and so on. Since there are these diversities within a culture, the
overall characterization of the culture as sensate provides no basis for
indicating which groups subscribe to one mode of thought, and which to
another. Sorokin does not systematically explore varying existential bases
within a society or culture; he looks to the "dominant" tendencies and
imputes these to the culture as a whole. 19 Our contemporary society, quite
apart from the differences of intellectual outlook of divers classes and
groups, is viewed as an integral exemplification of sensate culture. On its
own premises, Sorokin's approach is primarily suited for an overall characterization of cultures, not for analyzing connections between varied
existential conditions and thought within a society.
Types of Knowledge
Even a cursory survey is enough to show that the term "knowledge" has
been so broadly conceived as to refer to every type of idea and every mode
17. Ibid., 2: 5.
18. Ibid., 1: 73.
19. One "exception" to this practice is found in his contrast between the prevalent
tendency of the "clergy and religious landed aristocracy to become the leading and
organizing classes in the Ideational, and the capitalistic bourgeoisie, intelligentsia,
professionals, and secular officials in the Sensate culture" (ibid., 3: 250). And see his
account of the diffusion of culture among social classes (ibid., 4: 221 ff).
19
chapter 6.
21. This is presumably the ground for Scheler's remark: "A specific thesis of the
economic conception of history is the subsumption of the laws of development of
all knowledge under the laws of development of ideologies." Die Wissensformen, p.
21.
22. Engels, letter to Conrad Schmidt, 27 October 1890, in Marx, Selected Works,
1: 385.
20
21
the sensuous activity of men. " 27 Along the same lines, Engels asserts that
the appearance of Marx's materialistic conception of history was itself
determined by "necessity," as is indicated by similar views appearing
among English and French historians at the time and by Morgan's independent discovery of the same conception. 28
He goes even further to maintain that socialist theory is itself a proletarian "reflection" of modern class conflict, so that here, at least, the very
content of "scientific thought" is held to be socially determined, 29 without
vitiating its validity.
There was an incipient tendency in Marxism, then, to consider natural
science as standing in a relation to the economic base different from that
of other spheres of knowledge and belief. In science, the focus of attention
may be socially determined but not, presumably, its conceptual apparatus.
In this respect, the social sciences were sometimes held to differ significantly from the natural sciences. Social science tended to be assimilated
to the sphere of ideology, a tendency developed by later Marxists into the
questionable thesis of a class-bound social science which is inevitably tendentious30 and into the claim that only "proletarian science" has valid
insight into certain aspects of social reality. 31
Mannheim follows in the Marxist tradition to the extent of exempting
the "exact sciences" and "formal knowledge" from existential determina27. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 36 (italics added). See also
Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1910), pp. 24-25,
where the needs of a rising middle class are held to account for the revival of science.
The assertion that "only" trade and industry provide the aims is typical of the extreme, and untested, statements of relationships which prevail especially in the early
Marxist writings. Such terms as "determination" cannot be taken at their face value;
they are characteristically used very loosely. The actual extent of such relationships
between intellectual activity and the material foundations were not investigated by
either Marx or Engels.
28. Engels, in Marx, Selected Works, 1: 393. The occurrence of parallel independent discoveries and inventions as "proof" of the social determination of knowledge was a repeated theme throughout the nineteenth century. As early as 1828,
Macaulay in his essay on Dryden had noted concerning Newton's and Leibniz's invention of the calculus: "Mathematical science, indeed, had reached such a point, that
if neither of them had existed, the principle must inevitably have occurred to some
person within a few years." He cites other cases in point. Victorian manufacturers
shared the same view with Marx and Engels. In our own day, this thesis, based on
independent duplicate inventions, has been especially emphasized by Dorothy
Thomas, Ogburn, and Vierkandt.
29. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, p. 97.
30. V. I. Lenin, "The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism," in
Marx, Selected Works, 1: 54.
31. Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism (New York: International Publishers, 1925), pp. xi-xii; B. Hessen in Science at the Cross-Roads (London: Kniga,
1932), p. 154; A. I. Timeniev in Marxism and Modern Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), p. 310; "Only Marxism, only the ideology of the advanced
revolutionary class is scientific."
22
tion but not "historical, political and social science thinking as well as the
thought of everyday life." 32 Social position determines the "perspective,"
that is, "the manner in which one views an object, what one perceives in
it, and how one construes it in his thinking." The situational determination
of thought does not render it invalid; it does, however, particularize the
scope of the inquiry and the limits of its validity. 33
If Marx did not sharply differentiate the superstructure, Scheler goes to
the other extreme. He distinguishes a variety of forms of knowledge. To
begin with, there are the "relatively natural Weltanschauungen": that which
is accepted as given, as neither requiring nor being capable of justification.
These are, so to speak, the cultural axioms of groups; what Joseph Glanvill, some three hundred years ago, called a "climate of opinion." A
primary task of the sociology of knowledge is to discover the laws of
transformation of these Weltanschauungen. And since these outlooks are
by no means necessarily valid, it follows that the sociology of knowledge
is not concerned merely with tracing the existential bases of truth buf also
of "social illusion, superstition and socially conditioned errors and forms
of deception." 34
The Weltanschauungen constitute organic growths and develop only in
long time-spans. They are scarcely affected by theories. Without adequate
evidence, Scheler claims that they can be changed in any fundamental
sense only through race-mixture or conceivably through the "mixture" of
language and culture. Building upon these very slowly changing Weltanschauungen are the more "artificial" forms of knowledge which may be
ordered in seven classes, according to degree of artificiality: ( 1 ) myth
and legend; (2) knowledge implicit in the natural folk-language; (3) religious knowledge (ranging from the vague emotional intuition to the fixed
dogma of a church); ( 4) the basic types of mystical knowledge; (5) philosophical-metaphysical knowledge; ( 6) positive knowledge of mathematics,
the natural and cultural sciences; (7) technological knowledge. 35 The more
artificial these types of knowledge, the more rapidly they change. It is
evident, says Scheler, that religions change far more slowly than the various
metaphysics, and the latter persist for much longer periods than the results
of positive science, which change from hour to hour.
This hypothesis of rates of change bears some points of similarity to
Alfred Weber's thesis that civilizational change outruns cultural change
and to the Ogburn hypothesis that "material" factors change more rapidly
32. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 150, 243; Mannheim, "Die Bedeutung
der Konkurrenz im Gebiete des Geistigen," in Verhandlungen des 6. deutschen Soziologentages (Tuebingen: 1929), p. 41.
33. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, pp. 256, 264.
34. Scheler, Die Wissensformen, pp. 59-61.
35. Ibid., p. 62.
23
24
mined by the set of absolute and timeless values which are implicit in the past
with which we are dealing. as
This is indeed counterrelativism by fiat. Merely asserting the distinction
between essence and existences avoids the incubus of relativism by exorcising it. The concept of eternal essences may be congenial to the metaphysician; it is wholly foreign to empirical inquiry. It is noteworthy that
these conceptions play no significant part in Scheler's empirical efforts to
establish relations between knowledge and society.
Scheler indicates that different types of knowledge are bound up with
particular forms of groups. The content of Plato's theory of ideas required
the form and organization of the platonic academy; so, too, the organization of Protestant churches and sects was determined by the content of
their beliefs which could exist only in this and in no other type of social
organization, as Troeltsch has shown. And, similarly, Gemeinschaft types
of society have a traditionally defined fund of knowledge which is handed
down as conclusive; they are not concerned with discovering or extending
knowledge. The very effort to test the traditional knowledge, in so far as
it implies doubt, is ruled out as virtually blasphemous. In such a group,
the prevailing logic and mode of thought is that of an "ars demonstrandi"
not of an "ars inveniendi." Its methods are prevailingly ontological and
dogmatic, not epistemologic and critical; its mode of thought is that of
conceptual realism, not nominalistic as in the Gesellschaft type of organization; its system of categories, organismic and not mechanistic. 39
Durkheim extends sociological inquiry into the social genesis of the
categories of thought, basing his hypothesis on three types of presumptive
evidence. ( 1) The fact of cultural variation in the categories and the rules
of logic "prove that they depend upon factors that are historical and consequently social."40 (2) Since concepts are imbedded in the very language
the individual acquires (and this holds as well for the special terminology
of the scientist) and since some of these conceptual terms refer to things
which we, as individuals, have never experienced, it is clear that they are
a product of the society. 41 And ( 3), the acceptance or rejection of concepts is not determined merely by their objective validity but also by their
consistency with other prevailing beliefs.42
38. Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge (New York:
Liveright, 1938), p. 150; Sorokin posits a similar sphere of "timeless ideas," e.g., in
his Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 1943),
pp. 215, passim.
39. Scheler, Die Wissensformen, pp. 22-23; compare a similar characterization of
"sacred schools" of thought by Florian Znaniecki, The Social Role of the Man of
Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), chap. 3.
40. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, pp. 12, 18, 439.
41. Ibid., pp. 433-35.
42. Ibid., p. 438.
25
26
27
28
29
A partial empirical account of false consciousness, implied in the Manifesto, rests on the view that the bourgeoisie control the content of culture
and thus diffuse doctrines and standards alien to the interests of the proletariat. 53 Or, in more general terms, "the ruling ideas of each age have ever
been the ideas of its ruling class." But this is only a partial account; at
most it deals with the false consciousness of the subordinated class. It
might, for example, partly explain the fact noted by Marx that even where
the peasant proprietor "does belong to the proletariat by his position he
does not believe that he does." It would not, however, be pertinent in
seeking to account for the false consciousness of the ruling class itself.
Another, though not clearly formulated, theme which bears upon the
problem of false consciousness runs throughout Marxist theory. This is
the conception of ideology as being an unwitting, unconscious expression
of "real motives," these being in turn construed in terms of the objective
interests of social classes. Thus, there is repeated stress on the unwitting
nature of ideologies: "Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called
thinker consciously indeed but with a false consciousness. The real motives
impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives." 54
The ambiguity of the term "correspondence" to refer to the connection
between the material basis and the idea can only be overlooked by the
polemical enthusiast. Ideologies are construed as "distortions of the social
situation";55 as merely "expressive" of the material conditions;56 and,
whether "distorted" or not, as motivational support for carrying through
real changes in the society. 57 It is at this last point, when "illusory" beliefs
are conceded to provide motivation for action, that Marxism ascribes a
measure of independence to ideologies in the historical process. They are
no longer merely epiphenomenal. They enjoy a measure of autonomy.
From this develops the notion of interacting factors in which the superstructure, though interdependent with the material basis, is also assumed
53. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 39: "In so far as they rule as a
class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they
do this in their whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their
age."
54. Engels' letter to Mehring, 14 July 1893, in Marx, Selected Works, 1: 388-89;
cf. Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire, p. 33; idem, Critique of Political Economy, p.
12.
55. Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire, p. 39, where the democratic Montagnards
indulge in self-deception.
56. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, pp. 26-27. Cf. Engels, Feuerbach,
pp. 122-23: "The failure to exterminate the Protestant heresy corresponded to the
invincibility of the rising bourgeoisie .... Here Calvinism proved itself to be the true
religious disguise of the interests of the bourgeoisie of that time" (italics added).
57. Marx grants motivational significance to the "illusions" of the burgeoning
bourgeoisie, in Der achtzehnte Brumaire, p. 8.
30
31
32
Ibid., p. 440.
Scheler, Die Wissensformen, p. 32.
Ibid, p. 56.
Ibid., p. 25; cf. pp. 482-84.
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
Znaniecki's
The Social Role
of the Man of
Knowledge
1941
42
1. Conservative:
2. Novationist:
(a) "Standpatter"
(a) Oppositionist
(b) Meliorist
(b) Revolutionary
43
44
even list these relations, but one or two instances will serve to illustrate
the systematic findings.
A convincing demonstration of the value of Znaniecki's approach is
found in his suggestive though brief resume of the various attitudes toward
"new unanticipated facts" of those who perform different intellectual roles.
It should be noted that these divers attitudes can be "understood" (or
"derived") from the particular role-systems in which the men of knowledge
participate; it is, in other words, an analysis of the ways in which various
social structures exert pressures for the adoption of certain attitudes toward new empirical data. The specialized interest in the finding of new
facts is construed as a revolt against established systems of thought which
have persisted largely because they have not been confronted with fresh
stubborn facts. Later, to be sure, even this "rebellious" activity becomes
institutionalized, but it arises initially in opposition to established and
vested intellectual systems. The technological leader regards genuinelynew
facts with suspicion, for they may destroy belief in the rationality of his
established plans, or show the inefficiency of his plans, or disclose undesirable consequences of his program. New facts within the compass of
his activity threaten his status. The technological expert, under the control
of the leader, is circumscribed in new fact-finding lest he discover facts
which are unwelcome to the powers that be. (See, for example, the suppression of new but "unwanted" inventions.) The sage, with his predetermined conclusions, has no use for the impartial observer of new facts
which might embarrass his tendentious views. Scholars have positive or
negative attitudes toward genuinely new facts, depending upon the extent
to which the schools' system is established: in the initial stages new facts
are at least acceptable, but once the system is fully formulated the inte!lectual commitment of the school precludes a favorable attitude toward novel
findings. Thus, "a discoverer of facts, freely roaming in search of the unexpected, has no place in a milieu of scientists with well-regulated tniditional roles." Znaniecki provides a pioneering analysis of the kind of
intellectual neophobia which Pareto largely treated as given rather than
problematical.
In similar fashion, Znaniecki shows how rivalry between schools of
sacred thought leads to secularization. The most general theorem holds that
conflict, as a type of social interaction, leads to the partial secularization of
sacred knowledge in at least three ways. First, the usual appeal to sacred
authority cannot function in the conflict situation, inasmuch as the rival
schools either accept different sacred traditions or interpret the same
tradition diversely. "Rational analysis" is adopted as an impartial arbiter.
Secondly, members of the outgroup (nonbelievers) must be persuaded that
their own faiths are suspect and that another faith has more to commend
it. This again involves rational or pseudorational argument, since there is
45
46
Social Conflict
Over Styles of
Sociological
Work
1961
After enjoying more than two generations of scholarly interest, the sociology of knowledge remains largely a subject for meditation rather than a
field of sustained and methodical investigation. This has resulted in the
curious condition that more monographs and papers are devoted to discussions of what the sociology of knowledge is and what it ought to be than
to detailed inquiries into specific problems.
What is true of the sociology of knowledge at large is conspicuously
true of the part concerned with the analysis of the course and character
taken by sociology itself. This, at least, is the composite verdict of the
jury of twelve who have reviewed .for us the social contexts of sociology
in countries all over the world. Almost without exception, the authors of
these papers report (or intimate) that, for their own country, they could
find only fragmentary evidence on which to draw for their account. They
emphasize the tentative and hazardous nature of interpretations based on
such slight foundations. It follows that my own paper, drawing upon the
basic papers on national sociologies, must be even more tentative and
conjectural.
In effect, these authors tell us that they have been forced to resort to
loose generalities rather than being in a position to report firmly grounded
generalizations. Generalities are vague and indeterminate statements that
bring together particulars which are not really comparable; generalizations
report definite though general regularities distilled from the methodical
comparison of comparable data. We all know the kind of generalities
found in the sociology of knowledge: that societies with sharp social
Originally published in Fourth World Congress of Sociology, Transactions (Louvain,
Belgium: International Sociological Association, 1961), 3:21-46; reprinted with
permission.
48
cleavages, as allegedly in France, are more apt to cultivate sociology intensively than societies with a long history of a more nearly uniform valuesystem, as allegedly in England; that a rising social class is constrained to
see the social reality more authentically than a class long in power but
now on the way out; that an upper class will focus on the static aspects of
society and a lower one on its dynamic, changing aspects; that an upper
class wiii be alert to the functions of existing social arrangements and a
lower class to their dysfunctions; or, to take one last familiar generality,
that socially conservative groups hold to multiple-factor doctrines of historical causation and socially radical groups to monistic doctrines. These
and comparable statements may be true or not, but as the authors of the
national reports remind us, we cannot say, for these are not typically the
result of systematic investigations. They are, at best, impressions derived
from a few particulars selected to make the point.
It will be granted that we sociologists cannot afford the dubious luxury
of a double standard of scholarship; one requiring the systematic collection
of comparable data when dealing with complex problems, say, of social
stratification, and another accepting the use of piecemeal illustrations when
dealing with the no less complex problems of the sociology of knowledge.
It might well be, therefore, that the chief outcome of this first session of
the congress will be to arrange for a comparative investigation of sociology
in its social contexts similar to the investigation of social stratification that
the Association has already launched. The problems formulated in the
national papers and the substantial gaps in needed data uncovered by them
would be a useful prelude to such an undertaking.
The growth of a field of intellectual inquiry can be examined under three
aspects: as the historical filiation of ideas considered in their own right;
as affected by the structure of the society in which it is being developed;
and as affected by the social processes relating the men of knowledge
themselves. Other sessions of the congress will deal with the first when the
substance and methods of contemporary sociology are examined. In his
overview, Professor Aron considers the second by examining the impact
on sociology of the changing social structure external to it: industrialization, the organization of universities, the role of distinctive cultural traditions, and the like. He goes on to summarize the central tendencies of
certain national sociologies, principally those of the United States and the
Soviet Union, and assesses their strengths and weaknesses. Rather than go
over much the same ground to arrive at much the same observations, I
shall limit myself to the third of these aspects. I shall say little about the
social structure external to sociologists and focus instead on some social
processes internal to the development of sociology and in particular on the
role in that development played by social conflict between sociologists.
49
There is reason to believe that patterns of social interaction among sociologists, as among other men of science and learning, affect the changing
contours of the discipline just as the cultural accumulation of knowledge
manifestly does. Juxtaposing the national papers gives us an occasion to
note the many substantial similarities if not identities in the development
of sociology in each country that underlie the sometimes more conspicuous
if not necessarily more thoroughgoing differences. These similarities are
noteworthy if only because of the great variability and sometimes profound
differences of social structure, cultural tradition, and contemporary values
among the twelve nations whose sociology has been reviewed. These
societies differ among themselves in the size of the underlying population,
in the character of their systems of social stratification, in the number,
organization, and distribution of their institutions of higher learning, in
their economic organization and the state of their technology, in their
current and past political structure, in their religious and national traditions, in the social composition of their intellectuals, and so on through
other relevant bases of comparison. In view of these diversities of social
structure, it is striking that there are any similarities in the course sociology has taken in these societies. All this suggests that a focus on the
social processes internal to sociology as a partly autonomous domain can
help us to understand a little better the similarities of sociological work in
differing societies. It may at the least help us identify some of the problems that could be profitably taken up in those monographs on the sociological history of sociology that have yet to be written. 1
50
The beginnings of sociology are of course found in the antecedent disciplines from which it split off. The differentiation differs in detail but has
much the same general character in country after country. In England, we
are told, sociology derived chiefly from political economy, social administration, and philosophy. In Germany, it shared some of these antecedents
as well as an important one in comparative law. In France, its roots were
in philosophy and, for a time, in the psychologies that were emerging. Its
varied ancestry in the United States included a concern with practical
reform, economics, and, in some degree, anthropology. Or, to tum to some
countries which have been described by their reporters as "sociologically
underdeveloped," in Yugoslavia, sociology became gradually differentiated
from ethnology, the history of law, and anthropogeography; in Spain, it
was long an appendage of philosophy, especially the philosophy of history.
The Latin American countries saw sociology differentiated from jurisprudence, traditionally bound up as it was with an interest in the social contexts of law and the formation of law that came with the creation, in
these states, of governments of their own.
The process of differentiation had direct consequences for the early
emphasis in sociology. Since the founding fathers were self-taught in
sociology-the discipline was, after all, only what they declared it to bethey each found it incumbent to develop a classification of the sciences in
order to locate the distinctive place of sociology in the intellectual scheme
of things. Virtually every sociologist of any consequence throughout the
nineteenth century and partly into the twentieth proposed his own answers
to the socially induced question of the scope and nature of sociology and
saw it as his task to evolve his own system of sociology.
Whether sociology is said to have truly begun with Vico (to say nothing
of a more ancient lineage) or with St. Simon, Comte, Stein, or Marx is of
no great moment here, though it may be symptomatic of current allegiances in sociology. What is in point is that the nineteenth centuryto limit our reference-was the century of sociological systems not necessarily because the pioneering sociologists happened to be system-minded
men but because it was their role, at that time, to seek intellectual legitimacy for this "new science of a very ancient subject." In the situation
confronting them, when the very claim to legitimacy of a new discipline
had to be presented, there was little place for a basic interest in detailed
and delimited investigations of specific sociological problems. It was the
framework of sociological thought itself that had to be built and almost
everyone of the pioneers tried to fashion one for himself.
The banal flippancy tempts us to conclude that there were as many
sociological systems as there were sociologists in this early period. But of
51
course this was not so. The very multiplicity of systems, each with its claim
to being the genuine sociology, led naturally enough to the formation of
schools, each with its masters, disciples, and epigoni. Sociology not only
became differentiated from other disciplines but became internally differentiated. This was not in terms of specialization but in the form of rival
claims to intellectual legitimacy, claims typically held to be mutually
exclusive and at odds. This is one of the roots of the kinds of social
conflict among sociologists today that we shall examine in a little detail.
Institutional legitimacy of sociology
If it was the founding fathers who initiated and defended the claim of
52
53
As the institutional legitimacy of sociology becomes substantially acknowledged-which does not mean, of course, that it is entirely free from attack
-the pressure for separatism from other disciplines declines. No longer
challenged seriously as having a right to exist, sociology links up again
with some of its siblings. But since new conceptions and new problems
have meanwhile emerged, this does not necessarily mean reconsolidation
with the same disciplines from which sociology drew its origins in a particular country.
Patterns of collaboration between the social sciences differ somewhat
from country to country and it would be a further task for the monographs
on the sociology of sociology to try to account for these variations. Some
of these patterns are found repeatedly. In France, we are told, the longlasting connection between sociology and ethnology, which the Durkheim
group had welded together, has now become more tenuous, with sociologists being increasingly associated with psychologists, political scientists,
and geographers. In the United States, as another example, the major
collaboration is with psychology-social psychology being the area of
convergence-and with anthropology. Another cluster links sociology with
political science and, to some extent, with economics. There are visible
stirrings to renew the linkage, long attenuated in the United States, of
sociology with history. The events long precede their widespread recognition. At the very time that American graduate students of sociology are
learning to repeat the grievance that historical contexts have been lost to
view by systematic sociology, the national organization of sociologists
is devoting annual sessions to historical sociology and newer generations
of sociologists, such as Bellah, Smelser, and Diamond are removing the
occasion for the grievance through their work and their program.
Each of the various patterns of interdisciplinary collaboration has its
intellectual rationale. They are not merely the outcome of social forces.
However, these rationales are apt to be more convincing, I suggest, to
sociologists who find that their discipline is no longer on trial. It has become sufficiently legitimized that they no longer need maintain a defensive
posture of isolation. Under these social circumstances, interdisciplinary
work becomes a self-evident value and may even be exaggerated into a
cultish requirement.
Summary
54
55
56
51
that seems required for the nonreciprocation of affect to operate with regularity. This requires a differentiation of status between the parties, at least
with respect to the occasion giving rise to the expression of hostility. When
this status differentiation is present, as with the lawyer and his client or
the psychiatrist and his patient, the nonreciprocity of expressed feeling is
governed by a technical norm attached to the more authoritative status
in the relationship. But in scientific controversies, which typically take
place among a company of equals for the occasion (however much the
status of the parties might otherwise differ) and, moreover, which take
place in public, subject to the observation of peers, this structural basis
for nonreciprocation of affect is usually absent. Instead, rhetoric is met
with rhetoric, contempt with contempt, and the intellectual issues become
subordinated to the battle for status.
In these polarized controversies, also, there is usually little room for the
third, uncommitted party who might convert social conflict into intellectual
criticism. True, some sociologists in every country will not adopt the allor-none position that is expected in social conflict. They will not be drawn
into what are essentially disputes over the definition of the role of the
sociologist and over the allocation of intellectual resources though put
forward as conflicts of sociological ideas. But typically, these would-be
noncombatants are caught in the crossfire between the hostile camps. Depending on the partisan vocabulary of abuse that happens to prevail, they
become tagged either as "mere eclectics," with the epithet, by convention,
making it unnecessary to examine the question of what it asserts or how
far it holds true; or, they are renegades, who have abandoned the sociological truth; or, perhaps worst of all, they are mere middle-of-the-roaders
or fence-sitters who, through timidity or expediency, will not see that they
are fleeing from the fundamental conflict between unalloyed sociological
good and unalloyed sociological evil.
We all know the proverb that "conflict is the gadfly of truth." Now,
proverbs, that abiding source of social science for the millions, often express a part-truth just as they often obscure that truth by not referring to
the conditions under which it holds. This seems to be such a case. As we
have noted, in social conflict cognitive issues become warped and distorted
as they are pressed into the service of "scoring off the other fellow." Nevertheless, when the conflict is regulated by the community of peers, it has
its uses for the advancement of the discipline. With some regularity, it
seems to come into marked effect whenever a particular line of investigation-say, of small groups-or a particular set of ideas-say, functional
analysis-or a particular mode of inquiry-say, historical sociology or
social surveys-has engrossed the attention and energies of a large and
growing number of sociologists. Were it not for such conflict, the reign
of orthodoxies in sociology would be even more marked than it sometimes
is. Self-assertive claims that allegedly neglected problems, methods, and
58
theoretical orientation merit more concerted attention than they are receiving may serve to diversify the work that gets done. With more room
for heterodoxy, there is more prospect of intellectually productive ventures,
until these develop into new orthodoxies.
Even with their frequent intellectual distortions (and possibly, sometimes because of them), polemics may help redress accumulative imbalances in scientific inquiry. No one knows, I suppose, what an optimum
distribution of resources in a field of inquiry would be, not least of all,
because of the ultimate disagreement over the criteria of the optimum. But
progressive concentrations of effort seem to evoke counterreactions, so
that less popular but intellectually and socially relevant problems, ideas,
and modes of inquiry do not fade out altogether. In social science as in
other fields of human effort, a line of development that has caught onperhaps because it has proved effective for dealing with certain problems
-attracts a growing proportion of newcomers to the field who perpetuate
and increase that concentration. With fewer recruits of high caliber, those
engaged in the currently unpopular fields will have a diminished capacity
to advance their work and with diminished accomplishments, they become
even less attractive. The noisy claims to underrecognition of particular
kinds of inquiry, even when accompanied by extravagantly rhetorical
attacks on the work that is being prevalently done, may keep needed intellectual variants from drying up and may curb a growing concentration
on a narrowly limited range of problems. At least, this possibility deserves
study by the sociologist of knowledge.
These few observations on social conflict, as distinct from intellectual
criticism, are commonplace enough, to begin with. It would be a pity if
they were banalized as asserting that peace between sociologists should
be sought at any price. When there is genuine opposition of ideas-when
one set of ideas plainly contradicts another-then agreement for the sake
of peaceful quiet would mean abandoning the sociological enterprise. I am
suggesting only that when we consider the current disagreements among
sociologists, we find that many of them are not so much cognitive oppositions as contrasting evaluations of the worth of one and another kind of
sociological work. They are bids for support by the social system of sociologists. For the sociologist of knowledge, these conflicts afford clues to the
alternatives from which the sociologists of each country are making their
deliberate or unwitting selection.
Types of Polemics in Sociology
These general remarks are intended as a guide to the several dozen foci
of conflict between sociologists. Let me comfort you by saying that I shall
not consider all of them here, nor is it necessary. Instead, I shall review
59
two or three of them in a little detail and then merely identify some of the
rest for possible discussion.
The trivial and the important in sociology
Perhaps the most pervasive polemic, the one which, as I have implied,
underlies most of the rest, stems from the charge by some sociologists that
others are busily engaged in the study of trivia, while all about them the
truly significant problems of human society go unexamined. After all, so
this argument goes, while war and exploitation, poverty, injustice, and
insecurity plague the life of men in society or threaten their very existence,
many sociologists are fiddling with subjects so remote from these catastrophic troubles as to be irresponsibly trivial.
This charge typically assumes that it is the topic, the particular objects
under study, that fixes the importance or triviality of the investigation. This
is an old error that refuses to stay downed, as a glance at the history of
thought will remind us. To some of his contemporaries, Galileo and his
successors were obviously engaged in a trivial pastime, as they watched
balls rolling down inclined planes rather than attending to such really
important topics as means of improving ship construction that would
enlarge commerce and naval might. At about the same time, the Dutch
microscopist, Swammerdam, was the butt of ridicule by those far-seeing
critics who knew that sustained attention to his "tiny animals," the microorganisms, was an unimaginative focus on patently trivial minutiae. These
critics often had authoritative social support. Charles II, for example,
could join in the grand joke about the absurdity of trying to "weigh the
ayre," as he learned of the fundamental work on atmospheric pressure
which to his mind was nothing more than childish diversion and idle
amusement when compared with the Big Topics to which natural philosophers should attend. The history of science provides a long if not endless
list of instances of the easy confusion between the seemingly self-evident
triviality of the object under scrutiny and the cognitive significance of the
investigation.
Nevertheless, the same confusion periodically turns up anew in sociology. Consider the contributions of a Durkheim for a moment: his choice
of the division of labor in society, of its sources and consequences, would
no doubt pass muster as a significant subject, but what of the subject of
suicide? Pathetic as suicide may be for the immediate survivors, it can
seldom be included among the major troubles of a society. Yet we know
that Durkheim's analysis of suicide proved more consequential for sociology than his analysis of social differentiation; that it advanced our understanding of the major problem of how social structures generate behavior
that is at odds with the prescriptions of the culture, a problem that confronts every kind of social organization.
60
You can add at will, from the history of sociology and other sciences,
instances which show that there is no necessary relation between the
socially ascribed importance of the object under examination and the
scope of its implications for an understanding of how society or nature
works. The social and the scientific significance of a subject matter can
be poles apart.
The reason for this is, of course, that ideally that empirical object is
selected for study which enables one to investigate a scientific problem
to particularly good advantage. Often, these intellectually strategic objects
hold little intrinsic interest, either for the investigator or anyone else.
Again, there is nothing peculiar to sociology here. Nor is one borrowing
the prestige of the better-established sciences by noting that all this is
taken for granted there. It is not an intrinsic interest in the fruit fly or the
bacteriophage that leads the geneticist to devote so much attention to them.
It is only that they have been found to provide strategic materials for
working out selected problems of genetic transmission. Comparing an
advanced field with a retarded one, we find much the same thing in sociology. Sociologists centering on such subjects as the immigrant, the stranger,
small groups, voting decisions, or the social organization of industrial
firms need not do so because of an intrinsic interest in them. They may be
chosen, instead, because they strategically exhibit such problems as those
of marginal men, reference group behavior, the social process of conformity, patterned sources of nonconformity, the social determination of
aggregated individual decisions, and the like.
When the charge of triviality is based on a common-sense appraisal of
the outer appearance of subject matter alone, it fails to recognize that a
major part of the intellectual task is to find the materials that are strategic
for getting to the heart of a problem. If we want to move toward a better
understanding of the roots and kinds of social conformity and the socially
induced sources of nonconformity, we must consider the types of concrete
situations in which these can be investigated to best advantage. It does not
mean a commitment to a particular object. It means answering questions
such as these: which aspects of conformity as a social process can be
observed most effectively in small, admittedly contrived, and adventitious
groups temporarily brought together in the laboratory but open to detailed
observations? which aspects of conformity can be better investigated in
established bureaucracies? and which require the comparative study of
organizations in different societies? So with sociological problems of every
kind: the forms of authority; the conditions under which power is converted into authority and authority into power; limits on the range of
variability among social institutions within particular societies; processes
of self-defeating and self-fulfilling cultural mandates; and so on.
61
62
63
64
65
66
Or, to take one last instance, Marx repeatedly noted that the patterns
of production-for example, in large-scale industry and among smallholding peasants-have each a distinctive social ecology. The spatial distribution of men on the job was held to affect the frequency and kind of
social interaction between them and this, in turn, to affect their political
outlook and the prospects of their collective organization. In these days,
a large body of investigation by non-Marxists, both in industrial and in
rural sociology, is centered on this same variable of the social ecology
of the job, together with its systemic consequences. But again, this continuity of problem and of informing idea tends to be obscured by conflicts
in political orientation. Detailed monographic study is needed to determine
the extent to which lines of sociological development fail to converge and
instead remain parallel because of ideological rather than theoretical
conflict.
Formal (abstract) and concrete sociology
61
are changing-and conversely, that these models often grow out of and
are modified and judged by their applicability to selected aspects of concrete social events. With respect to this conflict, the sociology of knowledge
confronts such problems as that of finding out whether, as is commonly
said, formal sociology is linked with politically conservative orientations
and concrete sociology with politically radical orientations. Furthermore,
how this social cleavage affects the prospects of methodical interplay between the two types of sociology.
A short miscellany of sociological conflicts
There is time only to list and not at all to discuss a few more of the current
conflicts in sociology.
The microscopic and the macroscopic. More than ever before, conflict is
focused on the social units singled out for investigation. This is often
described by the catchwords of "microscopic" and "macroscopic" sociology. The industrial firm is said to be studied in isolation from the larger
economic and social system or, even more, particular groups within the
single plant are observed apart from their relations with the rest of the
organization and the community. A microscopic focus is said to lead to
"sociology without society." A counteremphasis centers on the laws of
evolution of "the total society." Here, the prevailing critique asserts that
the hypotheses are put so loosely that no set of observations can be taken
to negate them. They are invulnerable to disproof and so, rather a matter
of faith than of knowledge.
Experiment and natural history in sociology. A parallel cleavage has developed between commitment to experimental sociology, typically though
not invariably dealing with contrived or "artificial" small groups, and
commitment to study of the natural history of groups or social systems.
Perhaps the instructive analogue here is to be found in the well-known
fact that Darwin and Wallace found certain problems forced upon their
attention when they reflected on what they saw in nature "on the large, on
the outdoor scale" but that they failed to see other related problems that
came into focus for the laboratory naturalists. Polarization into mutually
exclusive alternatives served little purpose there and it remains to be seen
whether it will prove any more effective in the advancement of sociology.
Reference-groups of sociologists. Conflict is found also in the sometimes
implicit selection of reference-groups and audiences by sociologists. Some
direct themselves primarily to the literati or to the "educated general
public"; others, to the so-called men of affairs who manage economic or
political organizations; while most are oriented primarily to their fellow
68
converting sociology into social psychology, with the result that the study
of social institutions is fading into obscurity. The trend toward social
psychology is said to be bound up with an excessive emphasis on the
subjective element in social action, with a focus on men's attitudes and
sentiments at the expense of considering the institutional conditions for
the emergence and the effective or ineffective expression of these attitudes.
To this, the polarized response holds that social. institutions comprise an
idle construct until they are linked up empirically with the actual attitudes
and values and the actual behavior of men, whether this is conceived as
purposive or as also unwitting, as decisions or as responses. These sociologists consider the division between the two disciplines an unfortunate
artifact of academic organization. And again, apart from the merits of
one or the other position, we have much to learn about the social bases for
their being maintained by some and rejected by others.
A Concluding Observation
In the final remark on these and the many other lines of cleavage among
sociologists, I should like to apply a formulation about the structure of
social conflict in relation to the intensity of conflict that was clearly stated
by Georg Simmel and Edward Ross. This is the hypothesis, in the words
of Ross, that
a society . . . which is riven by a dozen . . . (conflicts) along lines running in
every direction, may actually be in less danger of being torn with violence or
falling to pieces than one split along just one line. For each new cleavage
contributes to narrow the cross clefts, so that one might say that society
is sewn togeher by its inner conflicts.
69
It is a hypothesis borne out by its own history, for since it was set forth
by Simmel and by Ross, it has been taken up or independently originated
by some scores of sociologists, many of whom take diametrically opposed
positions on some of the issues we have reviewed. (I mention only a few
of these: Wiese and Becker, Hiller, Myrdal, Parsons, Berelson, Lazarsfeld
and McPhee, Robin Williams, Coser, Dahrendorf, Coleman, Lipset and
Zelditch, and among the great number of recent students of "statusdiscrepancy," Lenski, Adams, Stogdill, and Hemphill.)
Applied to our own society of sociologists, the Simmel-Ross hypothesis
has this to say. If the sociologists of one nation take much the same
position on each of these many issues while the sociologists of another
nation consistently hold to the opposed position on them all, then the lines
of cleavage will have become so consolidated along a single axis that any
conversation between the sociologists of these different nations will be
pointless. But if, as I believe is the case, there is not this uniformity of
outlook among the sociologists of each nation; if individual sociologists
have different combinations of position on these and kindred issues, then
effective intellectual criticism can supplant social conflict.
That is why the extent of heterodoxies among the sociologists of each
nation has an important bearing on the future development of world sociology. The heterodoxies in one nation provide intellectual linkages with
orthodoxies in other nations. On the worldwide scale of sociology, this
bridges lines of cleavage and makes for the advance of sociological science
rather than of sociological ideologies.
Technical
and Moral
Dimensions of
Policy Research
1949
71
Quite apart from the direct intellectual merits of the problem, the most
varied groups have a stake in an analysis of the present and potential role
of applied social science in American society. Most prominently, social
scientists themselves stand to gain by such inquiry. Perhaps owing to the
absence of any systematic appraisal of their role, social scientists are
sometimes beset with exaggerated doubts and harassed by exaggerated
claims concerning their contributions to solutions for the problems of our
day. The actual .workaday relations between basic and applied social
science must for them be largely matters of opinion, sometimes well
founded, at other times not, simply because these relations have not been
made the object of systematic investigation.
Foundations and other philanthropic agencies engaged in endowing
social science research have their stake in the inquiry as well. For until the
actual, not the supposed or ideal, relations between basic and applied
research are clarified, policies governing a program of endowed research
must be based on rule-of-thumb experience. Yet it would seem the most
elementary rule of intelligent administration to examine, from time to time,
the consequences of diverse decisions. Are there types of applied research
in social science which fructify basic theory? Do other types of applied
research deflect scientific talent from fundamental inquiries into theory
and methodology? Under which conditions does there occur a fruitful
reciprocity between applied and basic research? A preliminary inventory
may not succeed in providing circumstantial answers to these questions,
but it can scarcely fail to lighten the fog of ignorance which, one must
admit, now settles about the role of applied social science.
This inventory promises much the same returns for the maker of policy
in government, business, and industry. To a large and growing but precisely unknown extent, applied social science does find a place in the world
of practical decision. Much experience therefore exists, but this experience
has not been codified. What are the obstacles to the effective utilization of
applied social science? For which types of practical problems is the introduction of applied social science presently pointless and for which is it
prerequisite to the formation of intelligent policy? Are there circumstances
in which men of affairs have a direct stake in endowing basic research
rather than calling for immediate applications of preexisting knowledge?
After all, the decision to utilize or to forego applied social science is itself
a matter of policy and it would seem useful to have this policy based on
available, though presently uncoordinated, information.
It is long since time, finally, for the intelligent layman who does not
directly utilize applied social science himself to learn something of this
current in contemporary life. His preconceptions of social science may
range from unshakable skepticism to equally ill-founded fetishism. In
either case, how is he to arrive at an appropriate opinion? He is subjected
72
73
74
15
76
always discriminate between the "research" which has all the outward
trappings of rigorous investigation (sampling, design, controls, and so
on) but which is defective in basic respects, and the genuinely disciplined
investigation. The outward appearance is mistaken for the reality: "all
social researches look alike" to many laymen.
Since careless, undisciplined, irresponsible "research" may promise
larger returns at less expense, there may be a tendency for "bad research
to drive out good research." And when these spurious investigations are
tested in the crucible of experience, the resulting disappointment may lead
to a repudiation of social science in general.
The dimension of adequacy
There are apparently some enthusiasts who would seek in social science
knowledge the vade mecum to a scientifically planned and altogether
desirable world. There are others who view applied social science as only
an elaboration of the obvious, and who therefore consider it entirely
dispensable as a basis for policy and action. Still others hold that social
research is adequate when it deals with picayune problems and inadequate
when it deals with "significant" problems. Here again, more information
on the diverse images of adequacy and the comparative frequency of those
images would be of value in helping to shape the future of applied social
research.
Obviously, existing social science knowledge may be sufficient to deal
with certain types of practical problems and wholly inadequate to deal
with others. Thus, specific types of market researches may quite typically
satisfy the needs of clients, whereas researches on, say, propaganda may
prove typically unsatisfactory. The demands now made of applied social
scientists may far outrun the present capacity and equipment of social
science knowledge. As long as there is no roughly established inventory of
our present knowledge such that laymen and scientists alike may have
some approximate idea of applied researches which are and which are not
promising for policy decisions, this will continue to provide a flow of
disappointment and a consequent devaluation of the adequacy of applied
social research in general. It is unwise to permit exaggerated public images
of the immediately attainable achievements of applied social science to go
unchecked. 1
1. This general observation now takes on added force since the subsequent public
reactions to the erroneous election forecasts on 2 November 1948 by the major
polling organizations. It remains to be seen if the reaction against empiristic polling
forecasts is generalized to the discredit of social science. For further implications of
this polling episode, see footnote 9. [This subject was investigated by R. K. Merton
and P. K. Hatt, "Election Polling Forecasts and Public Images of Social Science,"
Public Opinion Quarterly 13 ( 1949): 185-222.-Eo.]
77
78
To obtain a systematic picture of the various structures of social relations between researcher and clientele, we have only to cross-classify the
two variables of research agency and of clients (as in the following
specimen classification) .
TABLE 1
Synopsis of Social Structures of Researcher and Client
Types of Clientele
------(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Government
Agency
A-1
A-3
(5)
Etc.
C-1
19
the organizational context. Thus, it may be found that when the organization of a client is itself the object of study (for example, a corporation,
governmental bureau or division, and so on), the research findings are
more likely to be taken as a basis of policy when the research is done by
"independent" outside agencies than by a research staff which is itself part
of the organization. Or, it may be found that applied social research for
welfare agencies tends to have fewer methodological by-products than
research for, say, business corporations.
It is in any case necessary to explore the assumption that the problems
of making social research applicable will vary according to the organizational contexts. And to test this assumption, it is necessary to have some
working classification of these contexts.
6. The Situational Context
There appears to be no literature which collates the types of situations
leading to the decision to conduct a research in applied social science.
Which occasions call applied research into being? And how do these
different types of situations affect the nature of the research and its utilization?
The conventional picture of how this comes to pass is clear enough: a
"problem" arises and the research worker, as a professional solver of
problems, is asked to discover a solution. But who originally perceives
the problem? Is it invariably the practical man of affairs, or, at times, the
social scientist himself? And which types of "problems" are subjected to
applied research and which are characteristically dealt with, without
recourse to research? What are the functions of the research as conceived
by the sponsor? And how does all this relate to the utilization and development of applied social science?
No systematic inventory of situationai contexts is attempted here, but at
least several can be identified. We can first consider the situations in which
the need for applied research is initially perceived by policy makers or by
social scientists.
Functions of research originated by policy makers
1. Individuals or organizations confront the problem of "influencing" or
"persuading" others to a given course of action. They seek "objective data"
to aid in persuasion. For example, an advertising agency has a research
conducted in the hope of convincing a client of the greater effectiveness
of their advertising program over alternatives proposed by rival agencies;
a pressure group sponsors an applied research to obtain data in support
of proposed legislation; a corporation vice-president solicits a research in
defense of his policies as against those advocated by another vice-president;
80
81
82
The policy maker often assumes that he has precisely identified his particular problem and comes to the researcher with a specific request for
research. But this may be premature specification. The researcher has the
task of ascertaining the central pragmatic problem rather than passively
accepting its initial specifications by the policy maker. Thus, a Jewish
"defense agency" requests a research to determine which of alternative
types of mass propaganda will probably be most effective in curbing antiSemitism. This does not represent the prime objective which is "reduction
of anti-Semitism." The policy maker has prematurely included in his statement of the problem a specification of means as well as the end-in-view.
The expert redefines the practical problem. On the basis of previous researches, he indicates that deep-seated prejudices are not markedly
vulnerable to propaganda campaigns. The problem becomes reformulated:
it is no longer an inquiry into efficiencies of alternative propaganda, but
the comparative efficacy of a given propaganda campaign and of interreligious voluntary organizations.
Overgeneralization of the problem
Or, the maker of policy may assume that he has sufficiently stated his
problem when he indicates his general objective. He may seek fuller
83
84
segregation in a housing community but not providing for ways and means
for local acceptance of this change.)
Value framework of the research worker
The research worker also has his values, tacit or explicit, which affect his
definition of the problem, the lines of investigation which seem to him
most fruitful, the alternative policies to be explored, and so on. These
values can be detected by determining the researcher's self-image of his
role:
As a technician, he will accept alternative proposals for policy as a
basis for research, providing only that these alternatives be technically
amenable to research. Since it is feasible to test symbolic ("psychological")
measures for improving the morale of Negro workers without eliminating
segregation, the technician finds this definition of the problem adequate
and confines himself accordingly. The researcher is asked to determine
how a given radio program can reach a larger audience; since this is a
feasible problem, he searches out strategic listening periods, and so forth
and is content t~ accept the policy maker's constant of increasing audience without exploring effects upon audience size of changing the program
content.
As a "socially oriented" scientist, he will explore only those policy alternatives which do not violate his own values. He not only includes in his
study symbolic means of improving worker morale (for example, symbolic
awards for performance, recreation groups, and so forth) but also "realistic" changes in situation (modified wage-policies, and so forth).
Study of the actual role played by the values of policy maker and
researcher in the formulation of the research should help carry this question from the exclusively ethical context to that of the impact of values
upon the relevance, scope, and utility of the research itself.
Moral and technical dimensions of research
The interaction between these aspects of social research is examined in the
following passage drawn from the study of a radio War Bond Drive in
World War IJ.3
Our primary concern with the social psychology of mass persuasion
should not obscure its moral dimension. The technician or practitioner in
mass opinion and his academic counterpart, the student of social psychology, cannot escape the moral issues which permeate propaganda as a
means of social control. The character of these moral issues differ some3. This section on moral and technical dimensions of research is drawn from
Robert K. Merton, Marjorie Fiske, and Alberta Curtis, Mass Persuasion (New York:
Harper & Row, 1946), pp. 185-89.
85
what for the practitioner and the investigator, but in both cases the issues
themselves are inescapable.
The practitioner in propaganda is at once confronted by a dilemma:
he must either forego the use of certain techniques of persuasion which
will help him obtain the immediate end-in-view or violate prevailing moral
codes. He must choose between being a less than fully effective technician
and a scrupulous human being or an effective technician and a less than
scrupulous human being. The pressure of the immediate objective tends to
push him toward the first of these alternatives. 4 For when effective mass
persuasion is sought, and when "effectiveness" is measured solely by the
number of people who can be brought to the desired action or the desired
frame of mind, then the choice of techniques of persuasion will be governed by a narrowly technical and amoral criterion. And this criterion
exacts a price of the prevailing morality, for it expresses a manipulative
attitude toward man and society. It inevitably pushes toward the use of
whatsoever techniques "work."
The sense of power that accrues to manipulators of mass opinion, it
would appear, does not always compensate for the correlative sense of
guilt. The conflict may lead them to a flight into cynicism. Or it may lead
to uneasy efforts to exonerate themselves from moral responsibility for the
use of manipulative tecnniques by helplessly declaring, to themselves and to
all who will listen, that "unfortunately, that's the way the world is . People
are moved by emotions, by fear and hope and anxiety, and not by information or knowledge." It may be pointed out that complex situations must
be simplified for mass publics and, in the course of simplification, much
that is relevant must be omitted. Or, to take the concrete case we have
been examining, it may be argued that the definition of war bonds as a
device for curbing inflation is too cold and too remote and too difficult a
conception to be effective in mass persuasion. It is preferable to focus on
the sacred and sentimental aspects of war bonds, for this "copy slant"
brings "results."
Like most half-truths, the notion that leaders of mass opinion must
traffic in sentiment has a specious cogency. Values are rooted in sentiment
and values are ineluctably linked with action. But the whole truth extends
beyond this observation. Appeals to sentiment within the context of relevant information and knowledge are basically different from appeals to
sentiment which blur and obscure this knowledge. Mass persuasion is not
manipulative when it provides access to the pertinent facts; it is manipulative when the appeal to sentiment is used to the exclusion of pertinent
information.
4. R. K. Merton, "Social Structure and Anomie," American Sociological Review
3 (1938): 672-82.
86
The technician, then, must decide whether or not to use certain techniques which though possibly "effective" violate his own sentiments and
moral codes. He must decide whether or not he should devise techniques
for exploiting mass anxieties, for using sentimental appeals in place of
information, for masking private purpose in the guise of common purpose. 5
He faces the moral problem of choosing not only among social ends but
also among propaganda means.
Although less conspicuous and less commonly admitted, a comparable
problem confronts the social scientist investigating mass opinion. He may
adopt the standpoint of the positivist, proclaim the ethical neutrality of
science, insist upon his exclusive concern with the advancement of knowledge, explain that science deals only with the discovery of uniformities and
not with ends and assert that in his role as a detached and dispassionate
scientist, he has no traffic with values. He may, in short, affirm an occupational philosophy which appears to absolve him of any responsibility for
the use to which his discoveries in methods of mass persuasion may be
put. With its specious and delusory distinction between "ends" and
"means" and its insistence that the intrusion of social values into the work
of scientists makes for special pleading, this philosophy fails to note that
the investigator's social values do influence his choice and definition of
problems. The investigator may naively suppose that he is engaged in the
value-free activity of research, whereas in fact he may simply have so
defined his research problems that the results will be of use to one group in
the society, and not to others. His very choice and definition of a problem
reflects his tacit values.
To illustrate: the "value-free" investigator of propaganda proceeds to
the well-established mode of scientific formulations, and states his findings:
"If these techniques of persuasion are used, then there will be (with a
stated degree of probability) a given proportion of people persuaded to
take the desired action." Here, then, is a formulation in the honored and
successful tradition of science-apparently free of values. The investigator
5. During the war, imagination triumphed over conscience among advertisers who
"ingeniously" related their products to the war effort. Radio commercials were not
immune from this technique. A commercial dentist, for example, suggests that a
victory smile helps boost morale and that we can have that smile by purchasing
our dentures from him. So, too, a clothing manufacturer reminds listeners that
morale is a precious asset in time of war and that smart clothes, more particularly
Selfridge Lane Clothes, give a man confidence and courage. Even ice cream becomes
essential to the war effort. "Expecting your boys back from an army camp? Give
them JL Ice Cream. They get good food in the army and it's your job to give them
the same at home." And a manufacturer of cosmetics becomes solicitous about the
imbalance in the sex ratio resulting from the war. "Fewer men around because of
the war? Competition keen? Keep your skin smooth. Keep attractive for the boys
in the service when they come marching home." See R. K. Merton, Office of Radio
Research, Broadcasting the War (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Intelligence, Office
of War Information, 1943 ), p. 37.
87
takes no moral stand. He merely reports his findings, and these, if they are
valid, can be used by any interested group, liberal or reactionary, democratic or fascistic, idealistic or power-hungry. But this comfortable solution
of a moral problem by the abdication of moral responsibility happens to
be no solution at all, for it overlooks the crux of the problem: the initial
formulation of the scientific investigation has been conditioned by the
implied values of the scientist.
Thus, had the investigator been oriented toward such democratic values
as respect for the dignity of the individual, he would have framed his
scientific problem differently. He would not only have asked which techniques of persuasion produce the immediate result of moving a given
proportion of people to action, but also, what are the further, more remote
but not necessarily less significant, effects of these techniques upon the
individual personality and the society? He would be, in short, sensitized to
certain questions stemming from his democratic values which would otherwise be readily overlooked. For example, he would ask, Does the unelaborated appeal to sentiment which displaces the information pertinent
to assessing this sentiment blunt the critical capacities of listeners? What
are the effects upon the personality of being subjected to virtual terrorization by advertisements which threaten the individual with social ostracism
unless he uses the advertised defense against halitosis or B.O.? Or, more
relevantly, what are the effects, in addition to increasing the sale of bonds,
of terrorizing the parents of boys in military service by the threat that only
through their purchase of war bonds can they ensure the safety of their
sons and their ultimate return home? Do certain types of war bond drives
by celebrities do more to pyramid their reputations as patriots than to
further the sale of bonds which would otherwise not have been purchased?
No single advertising or propaganda campaign may significantly affect the
psychological stability of those subjected to it. But a society subjected
ceaselessly to a flow of "effective" half-truths and the exploitation of mass
anxieties may all the sooner lose that mutuality of confidence and reciprocal trust so essential to a stable social structure. A "morally neutral"
investigation of propaganda will be less likely than an inquiry stemming
from democratic values to address itself to such questions.
The issue has been drawn in its most general terms by John Dewey:
"Certainly nothing can justify or condemn means except ends, results.
But we have to include consequences impartially.... It is wilful folly to
fasten upon some single end or consequence which is liked, and permit the
view of that to blot from perception all other undesired and undesirable
consequences." 6 If this study has one major implication for the under6. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Henry Holt & Co.,
1922), pp. 228-29. Cf. R. K. Merton, "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive
Social Action," American Sociological Review 1 ( 1936): 894-904.
88
89
searches in given areas so that the time required for new researches on a
specific problem in that area is somewhat reduced.
The costs of applied research
90
91
92
93
It appears that practicable policy alternatives are not explored because they
run counter to the values of the policy maker or the research worker.
(Thus, determining the most stable proportion of Negroes and whites in
a biracial community may be rejected since it implies an objectionable
"quota system.") In some cases, it is precisely the policy thus eliminated
which most fully meets the requirements of the practical situation. Since
these are ruled out, the resultant alternatives deriving from the research
may be of dubious utility, and the research eventuates in inaction.
The economic framework may lead to the premature
conclusion of a research (cf. section 9)
It is evident that limitations of time and funds at times condemn an applied
research to practical futility. In most investigations, there emerge alternative lines of inquiry which are not followed through simply because of
budgetary fiat. In such cases, it often happens that the research findings
may not be entirely adequate to arrive at the most appropriate recommendations for action. The gap between research and action could only
be closed or narrowed by following up the emerging implications.
Policy makers differ in their attitudes toward the taking of risks. No matter
how circumstantial and meticulous the research, there is an element of risk
in following the recomendations which seem to flow from the research.
. The policy maker may be more willing to take the risks involved in
decisions based on his past experience than risks found in research-based
recommendations. The applied scientist may be more often willing to
support certain policies than the policy maker, since it is the latter who
takes ultimate responsibility for the decision.
In some instances, a given research, however competent, may seem too
slender a basis for running the large risk. Thus, a bank or insurance
company may hesitate to invest in an interracial housing development
despite researches which suggest that the resulting problems can probably
be "managed." The economic investment is large; deep-seated public attitudes are involved; once made, the decision cannot be easily modified. In
such instances, it would not be expected that research, however sound
intellectually, will appreciably modify prevailing policies. Correlatively,
when risks are more limited-for example, the decision to introduce a
new personnel selection policy or a new advertising campaign-a far-fromconclusive research may affect a decision.
94
its use: the status of the research worker may play a large part. Systematic
inquiry into this possibility is indicated.
The foregoing account is far from exhaustive. It does, however, suggest
leads for determining how and why applied research does or does not
provide a direct mandate for policy and does or does not eventuate in
policy-formation. A key set of problems centers in the determinants of this
leap from research to practice.
13. Theory and Applied Social Science
Everyone who has read a textbook on scientific method knows the ideally
constructed relations between scientific theory and applied research. Basic
theory embraces key concepts (variables and constants), postulates,
theorems, and laws. Applied science consists simply in ascertaining (a) the
variables relevant to the problem in hand, (b) the values of the variables,
and (c) in accordance with previous knowledge, setting forth the uniform
relationships between these variables.
It will be instructive to discover how often this ideal pattern actually
occurs in the application of social science. We anticipate finding that it is
the exceptional rather than the typical pattern. In one sense, a major
objective of our proposed inquiry is to account for the discrepancies and
coincidences between the "ideal pattern" and the "actual pattern" of
relations between basic and applied social science.
In the present section, we confine ourselves to some remarks on the
role of preliminary conceptualization in applied research. There is no
danger that this will be mistaken for a comprehensive discussion.
Conceptualization at work: the "overlooked variable"
95
96
97
98
The
Perspectives of
Insiders and
Outsiders
1972
100
101
102
103
104
grams of study. But as Nathan Hare, the founding publisher of the Black
Scholar, stated several years ago, this is only on temporary and conditional
sufferance: "Any white professors involved in the program would have
to be black in spirit in order to last. The same is true for 'Negro'
professors." 9 Apart from this kind of limited concession, the Insider
doctrine maintains that there is a body of black history, black psychology,
black ethnology, and black sociology which can be significantly advanced
only by black scholars and social scientists.
In its fundamental character, this represents a major claim in the
sociology of knowledge that implies the balkanization of social science,
with separate baronies kept exclusively in the hands of Insiders bearing
their credentials in the shape of one or another inherited status. Generalizing the specific claim, it would appear to follow that if only black scholars
can understand blacks, then only white scholars can understand whites.
Generalizing further from race to nation, it would then appear, for example, that only French scholars can understand French society and, of
course, that only Americans, not their external critics, can truly understand
American society. Once the basic principle is adopted, the list of Insider
claims to a monopoly of knowledge becomes indefinitely expansible to all
manner of social formations based on ascribed (and, by extension, on
some achieved) statuses. It would thus seem to follow that only women
can understand women-and men, men. On the same principle, youth
alone is capable of understanding youth just as, presumably, only the
middle-aged are able to understand their age peers. 10 So, too, as we shift
to the hybrid cases of ascribed and acquired statuses in varying mix, on
the Insider principle, proletarians alone can understand proletarians, and
presumably capitalists, capitalists; only Catholics, Catholics; Jews, Jews;
and, to halt the inventory of socially atomized claims to knowledge with a
limiting case that on its face would seem to have some merit, it would
then plainly follow that only sociologists can possibly understand their
fellow sociologists. 11
9. Nathan Hare as quoted by John H. Bunzel in "Black Studies at San Francisco
State," Public Interest 13 (Fall 1968): 32.
10. Actually, the case of age status is structurally different from that of other
ascribed statuses. For although, even in this time of advanced biotechnology, a few
men become transformed into women and vice versa, this remains a comparatively
rare instance of the ordinarily ascribed status of sex becoming an achieved status.
But in contrast to sex and other ascribed statuses, each successive age status has been
experienced by suitably long-lived social scientists (within the limits of their own
inexorably advancing age cohorts). On the basis of a dynamic Insider doctrine, then,
it might even be argued that older social scientists are better able than very young
ones to understand the various other age strata. As context, see the concept of the
reenactment of complementary roles in the life cycle of scientists in chapter 22 of
this volume.
11. As we shall see, this is a limiting type of case that merges into quite another
type, since as a fully acquired status, rather than an ascribed one, that of the soci-
105
106
ment that the Outsider may be incompetent, given to quick and superficial
forays into the group or culture under study and even unschooled in its
language. That this kind of incompetence can be found is beyond doubt
but it holds no principled interest for us. Foolish men (and women) or
badly trained men (and women) are to be found everywhere, and anthropologists and sociologists and psychologists and historians engaged in
study of groups other than their own surely have their fair share of them. 15
But such cases of special ineptitude do not bear on the Insider principle.
It is not merely that Outsiders have their share of incompetents. The
Insider principle does not refer to stupidly designed and stupidly executed
inquiries that happen to be made by stupid Outsiders; it advances a far
more fundamental position. According to that position, the Outsider, no
matter how careful and talented, is excluded in principle from gaining
access to the social and cultural truth.
In short, the doctrine holds that the Outsider has a structurally imposed incapacity to comprehend alien groups, statuses, cultures, and
societies. Unlike the Insider, the Outsider has neither been socialized in the
group nor has engaged in the run of experience that makes up its life, and
therefore cannot have the direct, intuitive sensibility that alone makes
empathic understanding possible. Only through continued socialization in
the life of a group can one become fully aware of its symbolisms and
socially shared realities: only so can one understand the fine-grained
meanings of behavior, feelings, and values; only so can one decipher the
unwritten grammar of conduct and the nuances of cultural idiom. Or, to
take a specific expression of this thesis by Ralph W. Conant (1968):
"Whites are not and never will be as sensitive to the black community
precisely because they are not part of that community." Correlatively,
Abd-1 Hakimu Ibn Alkalimat (Gerald McWorter) draws a sharp contrast
between the concepts of "a black social science" and "a white social
science." 16
A somewhat less stringent version of the doctrine maintains only that
Insider and Outsider scholars have significantly different foci of interest.
The argument goes somewhat as follows. The Insiders, sharing the deepest
concerns of the group or at the least being thoroughly aware of them, will
so direct their inquiries as to have them be relevant to those concerns. So,
too, the Outsiders will inquire into problems relevant to the distinctive
values and interests which they share with members of their group. But
15. As I have noted in the first edition of this paper, the social scientists of India,
for one example, have long suffered the slings and arrows of outrageously unprepared
and altogether exogenous social scientists engaging in swift, superficial inquiries
into matters Indian; see "Insiders and Outsiders," in Essays on Modernization of
Underdeveloped Societies, ed. A. R. Desai (Bombay: Thacker, 1971).
16. See "The Ideology of Black Social Science," Black Scholar 1 (December
1969): 35.
107
these are bound to differ from those of the group under study if only be.cause the Outsiders occupy different places in the social structure.
This is a hypothesis which has the not unattractive quality of being
readily amenable to empirical investigation. It should be possible to compare the spectrum of research problems about, say, the black population
in the country that have been investigated by black sociologists and by
white ones, or say, the spectrum of problems about women that have been
investigated by female sociologists and by male ones, in order to find out
whether the foci of attention in fact differ and if so, to what degree and
in which respects. The only inquiry of this kind I happen to know of was
published more than a quarter-century ago. William Fontaine 17 found
that Negro scholars tended to adopt analytical rather than morphological
categories in their study of behavior, that they emphasized environmental
rather than biological determinants of that behavior, and tended to make
use of strikingly dramatic rather than representative data. All this was
ascribed to a caste-induced resentment among Negro scholars. But since
this lone study failed to examine the frequency of subjects, types of
interpretation, and uses of data among a comparable sample of white
scholars at the time, the findings are somewhat less than compelling. All
the same, the questions it addressed remain. For there is theoretical reason
to suppose that the foci of research adopted by Insiders and Outsiders
and perhaps their categories of analysis as well will tend to differ. At
least, Max Weber's notion of Wertbeziehung suggests that differing social
locations, with their distinctive interests and values, will affect the selection
of problems for investigation. 18
Unlike the stringent version of the doctrine which maintains that
Insiders and Outsiders must arrive at different (and presumably incompatible) findings and interpretations even when they do examine the same
problems, this weaker version argues only that they will not deal with
the same questions and so will simply talk past one another. With the two
versions combined, the extended version of the Insider doctrine can also
be put in the vernacular: one must not only be one in order to understand
one; one must be one in order to understand what is most worth understanding.
Clearly, the social epistemological doctrine of the Insider links up with
what Sumner long ago defined as ethnocentrism: "the technical name
for [the] view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it." Sumner
then goes on to include as a component of ethnocentrism, rather than as
17. "'Social Determination' in the Writings of Negro Scholars," American Journal
of Sociology 49 (Winter 1944): 302-15.
18. See Weber's Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Wissenschaftslehre ( 1922; reprint ed.,
Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr [P. Siebeck], 1951), pp. 146-214.
108
109
110
111
112
Neither this aspect of the Insider doctrine nor the statement on its
implications is at all new. Almost a century ago, Frederick Douglass
hinged his observations along these lines on the distinction between collective and individual self-images based on ascribed and achieved status:
One of the few errors to which we are clinging most persistently and, as I
think, most mischievously has come into great prominence of late. It is the
cultivation and stimulation among us of a sentiment which we are pleased to
call race pride. I find it in all our books, papers, and speeches. For my part
I see no superiority or inferiority in race or color. Neither the one nor the
other is a proper source of pride or complacency. Our race and color are not
of our own choosing. We have no volition in the case one way or another.
The only excuse for pride in individuals or races is in the fact of their own
achievements. . .. I see no benefit to be derived from this everlasting exhortation of speakers and writers among us to the cultivation of race pride. On the
contrary, I see in it a positive evil. It is building on a false foundation. Besides,
what is the thing we are fighting against, and what are we fighting for in 'this
country? What is the mountain devil, the lion in the way of our progress? What
is it, but American race pride; an assumption of superiority upon the ground
of race and color? Do we not know that every argument we make, and every
pretension we set up in favor of race pride is giving the enemy a stick to
break over our heads?26
In rejecting racial chauvinism, Douglass addressed the normative rather
than the cognitive aspect of Insiderism. The call to total commitment
requiring one collective loyalty to be unquestionably paramount is most
often heard when the collectivity is engaged in severe conflict with others.
Just as conditions of war between nations have long produced hyperpatriotism among national ethnocentrics, so current intergroup conflicts
have produced a strain toward hyperloyalty among racial or sex or age
or religious ethnocentrics. Total commitment easily slides from the solidarity doctrine of "our group, right or wrong" to the morally and cognitively preemptive doctrine of "our group, always right, never wrong."
Turning from the normative aspect, with its ideology exhorting prime
loyalty to this or that group, to the cognitive, specifically epistemological
aspect, we note that the Insider doctrine presupposes a particular imagery
of social structure.
Social Structure of Insiders and Outsiders
From the discussion thus far, it should be evident that I adopt a structural
conception of Insiders and Outsiders. In this conception, Insiders are the
26. From "The Nation's Problem," a speech delivered in 1889 before the Bethel
Literary and Historical Society in Washington, D.C., and now published in Negro
Social and Political Thought, ed. Howard Brotz (New York: Basic Books, 1966).
113
114
understand white men, and black men, not to understand black women, 29
and so through the various combinations of status subsets.
Structural analysis in terms of shared and mutually exclusive status sets
will surely not be mistaken either as advocating divisions within the ranks
of collectivities defined by a single prime criterion or as predicting that
such collectivities cannot unite on many issues, despite their internal
divisions. Such analysis only indicates the bases of social divisions that
stand in the way of enduring unity of any of the collectivities and so must
be coped with, divisions that are not easily overcome as new issues activate
statuses with diverse and often conflicting interests. Thus, the obstacles
to a union of women in England and North Ireland resulting from national,
political, and religious differences between them are no less formidable
than the obstacles, noted by Marx, confronting the union of English and
Irish proletarians. So, too, women's liberation movements seeking unity in
the United States find themselves periodically contending with the divisions
between blacks and whites within their ranks, just as black liberation
movements seeking unity find themselves periodically contending with the
divisions between men and liberated women within their ranks. 80
The problem of achieving unity in large social movements based on any
one status when its members are differentiated by crosscutting status sets
is epitomized in these words about women's liberation by a black woman
where identification with race is dominant: "Of course there have been
women who have been able to think better than they've been trained and
have produced the canon of literature fondly referred to as 'feminist literature': Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Betty Friedan, etc.
And the question for us arises: how relevant are the truths, the experiences,
the findings of white women to Black women? Are women after all simply
women? I don't know that our priorities are the same, that our concerns
and methods are the same, or even similar enough so that we can afford
to depend on this new field of experts (white, female) . It is rather obvious
that we do not. It is obvious that we are turning to each other." 81
29. The conflicts periodically reported by black women-for example, the debate
between Mary Mebane [Liza] and Margaret Sloan (in defense of Gloria Steinem)between identification with black liberation and the women's liberation movement,
reflect this sociological fact of cross-cutting status sets. The problem of coping with
these structurally induced conflicts is epitomized in Margaret Sloan's "realization
that I was going to help the brothers realize that as black women we cannot allow
black men to do [to] us what white men have been doing to their women all these
years" ("What We Should Be Doing, Sister," New York Times, 8 December 1971,
Op-Ed).
30. See Shirley Chisholm, "Racism and Anti-Feminism," Black Scholar 1 (Jan.Feb. 1970): 40-45; and Linda La Rue, "The Black Movement and Women's Liberation," Black Scholar 1 (May 1970): 36-42.
31. Toni Cade, ed., The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: New American Library, 1970), p. 9.
115
116
for highly fragmented small aggregates sharing the same status sets. Even
a truncated status set involving only three affiliations-WASPs, for example-would greatly reduce the number of people who, under the
Insider principle, would be able to understand their fellows (WASPs).
The numbers rapidly decline as we attend to more of the shared status sets
by including such social categories as sex, age, class, occupation, and so
on, toward the limiting case in which the unique occupant of a highly
complex status set is alone qualified to achieve an understanding of self.
The tendency toward such extreme social atomization is of course damped
by differences in the significance of statuses which vary in degrees of
dominance, saliency, and centrality. 34 As a result, the fragmentation of the
capacity for understanding that is implied in the total Insider doctrine
will not empirically reach this extreme. The structural analysis in terms of
status sets, rather than in the fictional terms of individuals being identified
in terms of single statuses, serves only to push the logic of Insiderism to
its ultimate methodological solipsism.
The fact of structural and institutional differentiation has other kinds of
implications for the effort to translate the Insider claim to solidarity into
an Insider epistemology. Since we all occupy various statuses and have
group affiliations of varying significance to us, since, in short, we individually link up with the differentiated society through our status sets, this
runs counter to the abiding and exclusive primacy of any one group affiliation. Differing situations activate different statuses which then and there
dominate over the rival claims of other statuses.
This aspect of the dynamics of status sets can also be examined from
the standpoint of the differing margins of functional autonomy possessed
by various social institutions and other social subsystems. Each significant
affiliation exacts loyalty to values, standards, and norms governing the
given institutional domain, whether religion, science, or economy. Sociological thinkers such as Marx and Sorokin, so wide apart in many of their
other assumptions, agree in assigning a margin of autonomy to the sphere
of knowledge even as they posit their respective social, economic, or
cultural determinants of it. The alter ego of Marx, for example, declares
the partial autonomy of spheres of thought in a well-known passage that
bears repetition here:
34. This is not the place to summarize an analysis of the dynamics of status sets
that takes up variation in key statuses (dominant, central, salient) and the conditions
under which various statuses tend to be activated, along lines developed in unpublished lectures by Merton (1955-71). For pertinent uses of these conceptions
in the dynamics of status sets, particularly with regard to functionally irrelevant
statuses, see Cynthia Epstein, Woman's Place: Options and Limits in Professional
Careers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), esp. chap. 3.
117
subsystems in the conceptions of Marx and Sorokin, see chapters 1 and 6 of this
volume. On the general notion of functional autonomy as advanced by Gordon W.
Allport in psychology, see the discussion and references in Merton, Social Theory and
Social Structure, pp. 15-16; on functional autonomy in sociology, see Alvin W.
Gouldner, "Reciprocity and Autonomy in Functional Theory," in Symposium on
Social Theory, ed. L. Z. Gross (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1958), and "Organizational Analysis," in Sociology Today, ed. Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and
L. S. Cottrell, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1959).
118
Along with the faults of neglecting the implications of structural differentiation, status sets, and institutional autonomy, the Insider (and comparable Outsider) doctrine has the further fault of assuming, in its claims
of monopolistic or highly privileged status-based access to knowledge, that
social position wholly determines cognitive perspectives. In doing so, it
affords yet another example of the ease with which truths can decline into
error merely by being extended well beyond the limits within which they
have been found to hold. (There can be too much of a good thing.)
A long-standing conception shared by various "schools" of sociological
thought holds that differences in the social location of individuals and
groups tend to involve differences in their interests and value orientations
(as well as the sharing of some interests and values with others). Certain
traditions in the sociology of knowledge have gone on to assume that these
structurally patterned differences should involve, on the average, patterned
differences in perceptions and perspectives. And these, so the convergent
traditions hold-their convergence being often obscured by diversity in
vocabulary rather than in basic concept-should make for discernible
differences, on the average, in the definitions of problems for inquiry and
in the types of hypotheses taken as points of departure. So far, so good.
The evidence is far from in, since it has also been a tradition in the sociology of scientific knowledge during the greater part of this century
to prefer speculative theory to empirical inquiry. But the idea, which can
be taken as a general orientation guiding such inquiry, is greatly transformed in Insider doctrine.
For one thing, that doctrine assumes total coincidence between social
position and individual perspectives. It thus exaggerates into error the
conception of structural analysis which maintains that there is a tendency
for, not a full determination of, socially patterned differences in the per36. Martin Kilson, "Black Studies Movement: A Plea for Perspective," Crisis 16
(October 1969): 329-30, italics added.
119
120
the glaring exception of age status itself, ascribed statuses are generally
retained throughout the life span. Yet sociologically considered, there is
nothing fixed about the boundaries separating Insiders from Outsiders. As
situations involving different values arise, different statuses are activated
and the lines of separation shift. Thus, for a large number of white
Americans, Joe Louis was a member of an outgroup. But when Louis
defeated the N azified Max Schmeling, many of the same white Americans
promptly redefined him as a member of the (national) ingroup. National
self-esteem took precedence over racial separatism. That this sort of drama
in which changing situations activate differing statuses in the status set
is played out in the domain of the intellect as well is the point of Einstein's
ironic observation in an address at the Sorbonne: "If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and
France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory
prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will
declare that I am a Jew." 38
Like earlier conceptions in the sociology of knowledge, recent Insider
doctrines maintain that, in the end, it is a special category of Insidera category that generally manages to include the proponent of the doctrine
-that has sole or privileged access to knowledge. Mannheim, 89 for example, found a structural warranty for the validity of social thought in the
"classless position" of the "socially unattached intellectuals" (sozialfreischwebende lntelligenz). In his view, these intellectuals can comprehend
the conflicting tendencies of the time since, among other things, they are
"recruited from constantly varying social strata and life-situations." (This
is more than a little reminiscent of the argument in the Communist Manifesto which emphasizes that "the proletariat is recruited from all classes
of the population.") 40 Without stretching this argument to the breaking
point, it can be said that Mannheim in effect claims that there is a category
of socially free-floating intellectuals who are both Insiders and Outsiders.
38. On the general point of shifting boundaries, see Merton, Social Theory and
Social Structure, pp. 338-42, 479-80. Einstein was evidently quite taken with the
situational determination of shifts in group boundaries. In a statement written for
the London Times at a time (28 November 1919) when the animosities of World
War I were still largely intact, he introduced slight variations on the theme: "The
description of me and my circumstances in the Times shows an amusing flare of
imagination on the part of the writer. By an application of the theory of relativity
to the taste of the reader, today in Germany I am called a German of science and
in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be regarded as a 'bete noire'
the description will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the German and
a German for the English" (quoted in Philipp Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times
[New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963], p. 144).
39. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936), pp. 10, 139, 232.
40. For further discussion of the idea of social structural warranties of validity,
see Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, pp. 560-62.
121
122
life in the black community and typically could not, even in those rare
cases where they would. The structure of racial segregation meant that the
whites who prided themselves on "understanding" Negroes knew little
more than their stylized role behaviors in relation to whites and next to
nothing of their private lives. As Arthur Lewis has noted, something of
the same sort still obtains with the "integration" of many blacks into the
larger society during the day coupled with segregation at night as blacks
and whites return to their respective ghettos. In these ways, segregation
can make for asymmetrical sensitivities across the divide.
Although there is a sociological tradition of reflection and research on
marginality in relation to thought, sociologists have hardly begun the hard
work of seriously investigating the family of hypotheses in the sociology
of knowledge that derive from this conception of asymmetrical relations
between diverse kinds of Insiders and Outsiders.
Outsider Doctrine and Perspectives
The strong version of the Insider doctrine, with its epistemological claim
to a monopoly of certain kinds of knowledge, runs counter to a long history
of thought. From the time of Francis Bacon, to reach no further back,
students of the intellectual life have emphasized the corrupting influence
of group loyalties upon the human understanding. Among Bacon's four
Idols (or sources of false opinion), we need only recall the second, the
Idol of the Cave. Drawing upon Plato's allegory of the cave in the
Republic, Bacon undertakes to tell how the immediate social world in
which we live seriously limits what we are prepared to perceive and how
we perceive it. Dominated by the customs of our group, we maintain
received opinions, distort our perceptions to have them accord with these
opinions, and are thus held in ignorance and led into error which we
parochially mistake for the truth. Only when we escape from the cave and
extend our vision do we provide for access to authentic knowledge. By
implication, it is through the iconoclasm that comes with changing or
multiple group affiliations that we can destroy the Idol of the Cave, abandon delusory doctrines of our own group, and enlarge the prospects for
reaching the truth. For Bacon, the dedicated Insider is peculiarly subject
to the myopia of the cave.
In this conception, Bacon characteristically attends only to the dysfunctions of group affiliation for knowledge. Since for him access to
authentic knowledge requires that one abandon superstition and prejudice,
and since these stem from groups, it would not occur to Bacon to consider
the possible functions of social locations in society as providing for observability and access to particular kinds of knowledge.
123
In far more subtle style, the founding fathers of sociology in effect also
argued against the strong form of the Insider doctrine without turning to
the equal and opposite error of advocating the strong form of the Outsider doctrine (which would hold that knowledge about groups, unprejudiced by membership in them, is accessible only to outsiders).
The ancient epistemological problem of subject and object was taken
up in the discussion of historical V erstehen. Thus, first Simmel and then,
repeatedly, Max Weber symptomatically adopted the memorable aphorism:
"one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar." 41 In making this
claim, they rejected the extreme Insider thesis which asserts in effect that
one must be Caesar in order to understand him just as they rejected the
extreme Outsider thesis that one must not be Caesar in order to understand
him.
The observations of Simmel and Weber bear directly upon implications
of the Insider doctrine that reach beyond its currently emphasized scope.
The dedicated Insider argues that the authentic understanding of group
life can be achieved only by those who are directly engaged as members
in it. Taken seriously, the doctrine puts in question the validity of just
about all historical writing, as Weber clearly saw. 42 If direct engagement
in the life of a group is essential to understanding it, then the only authentic history is contemporary history, written in fragments by those most
fully involved in making inevitably limited portions of it. Rather than
constituting only the raw materials of history, the documents prepared by
engaged Insiders become all there is to history. But once the historian
41. Thanks to Donald N. Levine (Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social
Forms [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971], p. xxiii), I learn that in often
attributing the aphorism, with its many implications for social epistemology, to
Weber, I had inadvertently contributed to a palimpsestic syndrome: assigning a
striking idea or formulation to the author who first introduced us to it when in fact
that author had simply adopted or revived a formulation that he (and others versed
in the same tradition) knew to have been created by another. As it happens, I first
came upon the aphorism in Weber's basic paper on the categories of a verstehende
sociology published in 1913. In that passage, he treats the aphorism as common
usage which he picks up for his own analytical purposes: "Man muss, wie oft
gesagt worden ist, 'nicht Casar sein, urn Casar zu verstehen.' " Alerted by Levine's
note, I now find that Weber made earlier use of the aphorism back in 1903-6
(Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 100-101) as he drew admiringly
upon Simmel's Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie to which he attributes the most
thoroughly developed beginnings of a theory of Verstehen. Properly enough, Weber
devotes a long, long note to the general implications of Simmel's use of the aphorism,
quoting it just as we have seen but omitting the rest of Simmel's embellished version:
"Und kein zweiter Luther, urn Luther zu begreifen." In his later work, Weber incorporated the aphorism whenever he examined the problem of the "understandability"
of the actions of others.
42. See Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 428. Having quoted the
Caesar aphorism, Weber goes on to draw the implication for historiography: "Sonst
ware aile Geschichtsschreibung sinnlos."
124
elects to write the history of a time other than his own, even the most
dedicated Insider, of the national, sex, age, racial, ethnic, or religious
variety, becomes the Outsider, condemned to ignorance and error. If the
Insider is capable of knowing and understanding because he was actually
there-in that place, in that time, and, above all else, in that active rolethen all historians, black or white, old or young, men or women, are permanently estopped from writing history of the remote time or place.
Writing some twenty years ago in another connection, Claude LeviStrauss noted the parallelism between history and ethnography. Both
subjects, he observed,
are concerned with societies other than the one in which we live. Whether this
otherness is due to remoteness in time (however slight) or to remoteness in
space, or even to cultural heterogeneity, is of secondary importance compared
to the basic similarity of perspective. All that the historian or ethnographer
can do, and all that we can expect of either of them, is to enlarge a specific
experience to the dimensions of a more general one, which thereby becomes
accessible as experience to men of another country or another epoch. And in
order to succeed, both historian and ethnographer must have the same qualities:
skill, precision, a sympathetic approach and objectivity. 43
Our question is, of course, whether the qualities required by the historian
and ethnographer as well as other social scientists are confined to or
largely concentrated among Insiders or Outsiders. Simmel, and after him,
Schutz, and others have pondered the roles of that incarnation of the
Outsider, the stranger who moves on. 44 In a fashion oddly reminiscent of
the anything-but-subtle Baconian doctrine, Simmel develops the thesis that
the stranger, not caught up in commitments to the group, can more readily
acquire the strategic role of the relatively objective inquirer. "He is freer,
practically and theoretically," notes Simmel, "he surveys conditions with
less prejudice; his criteria for them are more general and more objective
ideals; he is not tied down in his action by habit, piety, and precedent." 45
Above all, and here Simmel departs from the simple Baconian conception,
the objectivity of the stranger "does not simply involve passivity and
detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness,
indifference and involvement." It is the stranger, too, who finds what is
43. The essay from which this is drawn was first published in 1949 and is reprinted in Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books,
1963); seep. 16 for the quotation.
44. See Simmel, Soziologie; and Alfred Schutz, "The Stranger: An Essay in Social
Psychology," American Journal of Sociology 49 (May 1944):499-507. It is symbolically appropriate that Simmel should have been attuned to the role of the
stranger as outsider. For as Lewis Coser has shown, Simmel's style of sociological
work was significantly influenced by his role as "the Stranger in the Academy"; see
Georg Simmel. pp. 29-39.
45. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated, edited, and with
an introduction by Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), pp. 404-5.
125
126
this most perceptive Outsider did not manage to transcend some of the
deep-seated racial beliefs and myths he encountered in this country.
Having condemned the Anglo-Americans whose "oppression has at one
stroke deprived the descendants of the Africans of almost all the privileges
of humanity"; having described slavery as mankind's greatest calamity
and having argued that the abolition of slavery in the North was "not for
the good of the Negroes, but for that of the whites"; having identified the
marks of "oppression" upon both the oppressed Indians and blacks and
upon their white oppressors; having noted "the tyranny of the laws"
designed to suppress the "unhappy blacks" in the states that had abolished
slavery; having approximately noted the operation of the self-fulfilling
prophecy in the remark that "to induce the whites to abandon the opinion
they have conceived of the moral and intellectual inferiority of their former
slaves, the Negroes must change; but as long as this opinion subsists, to
change is impossible"; having also approximated the idea of relative deprivation in the statement that "there exists a singular principle of relative
justice which is very firmly implanted in the human heart. Men are much
more forcibly struck by those inequalities which exist within the circle of
the same class, than with those which may be remarked between different
classes"; having made these observations and judgments, this talented
Outsider nevertheless accepts the doctrine, relevant in his time, that racial
inequalities "seem to be founded upon the immutable laws of nature
herself''; and, to stop the list of particulars here, assumes, as an understandable and inevitable rather than disturbing fact that "the Negro, who
earnestly desires to mingle his race with that of the European, cannot
effect it. " 47
Without anachronistically asking, as a Whig historian might, for altogether prescient judgments from this Outsider who, after all, was recording
his observations in the middle third of the last century, we can nevertheless
note that the role of Outsider no more guarantees emancipation from the
myths of a collectivity than the role of the Insider guarantees unfailing
insight into its social life and belief-systems.
What was in the case of Tocqueville an unplanned circumstance has
since often become a matter of decision. Outsiders are sought to observe
47. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America ([1835]; New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1945}, vol. 1, pp. 332, 360-61, chap. 18 passim, pp. 368, 358n, 373-74, 358-59,
335. Tocqueville also assumes that the "fatal oppression" has resulted in the enslaved
blacks becoming "devoid of wants," and that "plunged in this abyss of evils, [he]
scarcely feels his own calamitous situation," coming to believe that "even the power
of thought ... [is] a useless gift of Providence" (ibid., 1:333}. Such observations on
the dehumanizing consequences of oppression are remarkable for the time. As Oliver
Cromwell Cox observes about part of this same passage, Tocqueville's point "still has
a modicum of validity" (Caste, Class and Race [New York: Doubleday, 1948], p.
369n}.
127
social institutions and cultures on the premise that they can do so with
comparative detachment. In the first decade of this century, for example,
the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in its search for
someone to investigate the condition of medical schools, reached out to appoint Abraham Flexner, after he had confessed to never before having been
inside a school of medicine. It was a matter of policy to select a total
Outsider who, as it happened, produced the uncompromising Report that
did much to transform the state of American medical education at the
time.
Later, casting about for a scholar who might do a thoroughgoing study
of the Negro in the United States, the Carnegie Corporation searched for
an Outsider, preferably one, as they put it, drawn from a country of "high
intellectual and scholarly standards but with no background or traditions
of imperialism." These twin conditions of course swiftly narrowed the
scope of the search. Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries alone
seemed to qualify, the quest ending, as we know, with the selection of
Gunnar Myrdal. In the preface to An American Dilemma, Myrdal reflected
on his status as an Outsider who, in his words, "had never been subject to
the strains involved in living in a black-white society" and who "as a
stranger to the problem . . . has had perhaps a greater awareness of the
extent to which human valuations everywhere enter into our scientific
discussion of the Negro problem." 48
Reviews of the book repeatedly alluded to the degree of detachment
from entangling loyalties that seemed to come from Myrdal's being an
outsider. J. S. Redding, for one, wrote that "as a European, Myrdal had
no American sensibilities to protect. He hits hard with fact and interpretatiton." Robert S. Lynd, for another, saw it as a prime merit of this outsider that he was free to find out for himself "without any side glances as
to what was politically expedient." And, for a third, Frank Tannenbaum
noted that Myrdal brought "objectivity in regard to the special foibles and
shortcomings in American life. As an outsider, he showed the kind of
objectivity which would seem impossible for one reared within the
American scene." Even later criticism of Myrdal's work-notably, the
comprehensive critique by Cox-does not attribute imputed errors of
interpretation to his having been an outsider. 49
Two observations should be made on the Myrdal episode. First, in the
judgment of critical minds, the Outsider, far from being excluded from the
48. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern
Democracy (New York and London: Harper & Bros., 1944), pp. xviii-xix.
49. See J. S. Redding, "Review," New Republic, 20 March 1944, pp. 384-86;
Robert S. Lynd, "Prison for Our Genius," Saturday Review, 22 April 1944, pp. 5-7,
27; Frank Tannenbaum, "An American Dilemma," Political Science Quarterly 59
(September 1944): 321-30; and Cox, Caste, Class and Race, chap. 23.
128
129
130
any institutions which were basically black which were of good quality.
This has the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you think that
black persons cannot possibly have a good bank, then you don't put your
money in it. All the best professors leave black universities to go to white
universities as soon as they get the chance. The blacks even do the same
thing. And this makes your prediction, which wasn't true in the beginning,
come out to be true." 57
Black scholars and women scholars utilize the conception of the selffulfilling prophecy as a matter of course whenever it seems to illuminate
the condition they seek to understand. They do so without a backward
glance at the functionally irrelevant circumstance that the conception was
set forth and developed by scholars who happened to be neither black
nor female. Correlatively, white sociologists, both male and female, utilize
the conception of "status without substance" without pausing to consider
that it was originated by the. black sociologist, Franklin Frazier.58
Such diffusion of ideas across the boundaries of groups and statuses has
long been noted. In one of his more astute analyses, Mannheim states the
general case for the emergence and spread of knowledge that transcends
even profound conflicts between groups:
Syntheses owe their existence to the same social process that brings about
polarization; groups take over the modes of thought and intellectual achievements of their adversaries under the simple law of 'competition on the basis
of achievement.' . . . In the socially-differentiated thought process, even the
opponent is ultimately forced to adopt those categories and forms of thought
which are most appropriate in a given type of world order. In the economic
sphere, one of the possible results of competition is that one competitor is
compelled to catch up with the other's technological advances. In just the same
way, whenever groups compete for having their interpretation of reality accepted as the correct one, it may happen that one of the groups takes over
from the adversary some fruitful hypothesis or category-anything that
promises cognitive gain. . . . [In due course, it becomes possible] to find a
position from which both kinds of thought can be envisaged in their partial
correctness, yet at the same time also interpreted as subordinate aspects of a
higher synthesis.s9
The essential point is that, with or without intent, the process of intellectual exchange takes place precisely because the conflicting groups are in
interaction. The extreme Insider doctrine, for example, affects the thinking
of sociologists, black and white, who reject its extravagant claims. Intellectual conflict sensitizes them to aspects of their subject that they have
otherwise not taken into account.
control. Thus in order to keep woman in 'her place,' theories are propounded which
presume that her place is defined by nature" (Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, Rebirth
of Feminism [New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971], p. 193).
57. Hare, Black Anglo-Saxons, p. 65.
58. See Black Bourgeoisie.
59. Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, pp. 221-23.
131
132
133
"Knowledge about"
scire
wissen
savoir
134
135
136
knowledge and, specifically, that white scholars are scarcely barred from
contributing to what Frazier described as a "grasp of the condition and
fate of American Negroes." 71 Recognition of what has been called "the
mark of oppression," Frazier notes, "was the work of two white scholars
that first called attention to this fundamental aspect of the personality of
the American Negro. Moreover, it was the work of another white scholar,
Stanley M. Elkins, in his recent book on Slavery, who has shown the
psychic trauma that Negroes suffered when they were enslaved, the pulverization of their social life through the destruction of their clan organization, and annihilation of their personality through the destruction of
their cultural heritage." 72 And Cox, in his strong criticism of what he describes as "the black bourgeoisie school" deriving from Frazier's work,
emphasizes the distorting effects of the implicitly black nationalist ideology
of this school on the character of its work. 73
It should now be evident that structural analysis applied to the domain
of knowledge provides an ironically self-exemplifying pattern. For just as
the unity of any other collectivity based on a single status--of Americans
or of Nigerians, of blacks or of whites, of men or of women-is continuously subject to the potential of inner division owing to the other statuses
of its members, so with the collectivities often described as the scientific
community and the community of scholars. Their functional autonomy is
also periodically subject to great stress, owing in part to the complex social
differentiation of the population of scientists and scholars that weakens
their response to external pressures. The circumstances and processes
making for the fragility or resiliency of that autonomy constitute one of
the great questions in the sociology of knowledge.
It is nevertheless that autonomy which still enables the pursuit of truth
to transcend other loyalties, as Michael Polanyi, more than most of us,
has long recognized: "People who have learned to respect the truth will
feel entitled to uphold the truth against the very society which has taught
them to respect it. They will indeed demand respect for themselves on the
grounds of their own respect for the truth, and this will be accepted, even
against their own inclinations, by those who share these basic convictions."74
A paper such as this one needs no peroration. Nevertheless, here is
mine. Insiders and Outsiders, unite. You have nothing to lose but your
claims. You have a world of understanding to win.
71. See Cox, Caste, Class and Race, and his introduction to Hare, Black AngloSaxons; see also Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie and his "Failure of the Negro Intellectual," in E. Franklin Frazier on Race Relations, ed. G. Franklin Edwards (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1968).
72. Frazier, "Failure of the Negro Intellectual," p. 272.
73. Cox, introduction to Hare, Black Anglo-Saxons, pp. 15-31.
74. Polanyi, Study of Man, pp. 61-62.
The
Sociology of
Scientific
Knowledge
Part
Prefatory Note
A fundamental problem in the
sociology of scientific knowledge is,
of course, that of how science comes
to develop in the first place. This is
followed by the correlative, more
specific question: Once science
becomes culturally and institutionally established, what affects the
rate and directions of its development? The five papers assembled in
this section focus on the problematics of scientific knowledge and are
arranged in order of increasing
specificity with regard to particular
bodies of knowledge, beginning
with a critique of Sorokin's handling
of the larger question and concluding with an analysis of why the
sociology of science was itself not
a focus of scholarly attention for so
long a time.
In the first paper, Merton and
Bernard Barber undertake a
detailed consideration of Sorokin's
"emanationist" theory of the
development of science. Both
authors studied under Sorokin at
Harvard, Merton in the early 1930s
and Barber in the late 1930s and
after World War II. They are
thoroughly familiar with his work,
Merton having collaborated with
Sorokin on several investigations.
Sorokin's extensive reliance on the
concept of "cultural mentalities"
(idealistic, ideational, and sensate)
as the basic sources and results of
social change, and his dual use of
science as both symptom and consequence of the "sensate" mentality,
140
Prefatory Note
141
N.W.S.
Sorokin's
Formulations in
the Sociology
of Science
1963
[With Bernard Barber]
From the beginning we must abandon the attempt to put into short compass all the wide-ranging, diversified, and developing observations in the
sociology of science set forth by Pitirim Sorokin. Any such effort would
be the work of a sizable book, not of a short essay. For his contributions
to the sociology of science engage almost every other major part of his
empirically connected sociological theory. To try to trace out each component in his sociology of science--or, more generally, in his sociology of
knowledge-would mean to touch upon every other aspect of his voluminous works and this, even were it within our powers, would lead to an
intolerable and presumptuous duplication of much found elsewhere in the
volume devoted to his work. In place of a systematic treatment of Sorokin's
contributions to the sociology of science, therefore, we shall substitute
some observations that bear upon their most significant and sometimes
thorny aspects. In place of the many details that enter into his sociology
of science, we shall put the more general formulations that encompass
these details, knowing that this means the exclusion of issues that in a
more thorough examination would have to be taken up substantially. And
finally, in place of tracking down the development of Sorokin's ideas about
the sociology of science as these emerged over the course of almost half
a century, we shall deal primarily with his later ideas, particularly as these
were set forth in his Social and Cultural Dynamics. In short, this is only
an essay toward a critical understanding of Sorokin's work in the sociology
of science; it is not a comprehensive and methodical analysis of that work.
As though this were not enough of a limitation, we must confess to
another. We find it difficult, not to say impossible, to achieve a sufficient
Reprinted with permission from Pitirim A. Sorokin in Review, Philip J. Allen, ed.,
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963 ), pp. 332-68.
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
terested in the purely material phenomena" 14 (italics inserted). The comparative degrees of interest in these two broad classes of phenomena at
any one time need not be put in question. But it does divert us from considering the import of the fact that an immense interest has in recent
generations developed in the sciences of human behavior which are concerned with "spiritual, mental, and psychological phenomena." Paraphrasing Derek Price's estimate of physical scientists, we have only to remember
that more than 90 percent of all social and behavioral scientists that have
ever lived are still alive. This great interest in the scientific investigation
of man and his works is a historical fact that requires interpretation by the
sociology of science, but it is not one readily explained by Sorokin's macrosociological conceptions.
In emphasizing this general point, we should prefer not to be misunderstood. It is not being said that Sorokin's macrosociology of science is
theoretically incompatible with the more detailed analysis of varying developments of thought and science within each of his major types of culture.
It is not a matter of theoretical inconsistency but rather a matter of the
kinds of inquiry in the sociology of science that tend to be emphasized
and those that tend to be neglected in the macrosociological perspective.
That is what we mean by saying that, in this respect, Sorokin's theory is a
first approximation. It can be and, we argue, should be complemented by
intensive inquiries into the connections between types of scientific work
by men variously located in the social structure of a particular society.
Much the same issue is involved in Sorokin's treatment of long-run and
short-run fluctuations in the modes of thought prevailing in one or another
sphere of culture. Sorokin is of course primarily interested in the long-run
fluctuations of culture mentalities which he regards as fundamental to all
the rest. But he does attend-for example, in chapter 12 of the second
volume of the Dynamics-to short-run changes in such scientific theories
as atomism, vitalism, and mechanism in biology, abiogenesis, and corpuscular and wave theories of light, going on to note that "across the
ever-recurring alternation of these theories, short-time fluctuations may
also be perceived." 15 But these short-run variations do not engage Sorokin's
interest; he makes no effort to investigate their social and cultural sources.
More specifically, he observes, "The situation in regard to mechanistic and
vitalistic conceptions in the present century appears to be one of armed
conflict. Both conceptions seem to be existing side by side and both seem
to be flourishing." 16 Again, Sorokin does not consider it part of his theoretical commitment to examine the social and cultural conditions under
which these opposed biological theories are found in a state of armed
14. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, 2:13.
15. Ibid., 2:446.
16. Ibid., 2:454.
151
coexistence. Yet this would plainly be a major problem for the microsociology of science.
Cultural Determinism and the Relative Autonomy of Subsystems
Up to this point we have treated Sorokin's general theoretical position in
its more extreme and emphatically reiterated form. This position holds that
the three types of "culture mentalities" alone determine the form, substance, and development of knowledge in general and of science in particular. It is compactly expressed, for example, in Sorokin's assertion that
"Scientific theory thus is but an opinion made 'creditable' and 'fashionable'
by the type of the prevalent culture." 17 That theories in science which are
not acknowledged as valid by a substantial part of the community of scientist<; form no significant part of the science of the time is of course the case.
But this is a far cry from concluding that scientific theory is nothing but a
matter of accreditation and fashion. If this were so, it would negate a principal fact about the history of science, the selective accumulation of certified knowledge, albeit an accumulation that proceeds at uneven rates.
Whatever else may be disputed, we can scarcely deny that there exists a
greater stock of scientific knowledge today than in the remote past. There
is more here than a mere matter of belief and fashion.
In point of fact, Sorokin does not confine himself to the extreme position
that holds the development of science to be wholly determined by the
prevailing culture mentality. Instead, he introduces two qualifications, the
one emphasized as an integral part of his theory and .the other treated
casually and only in passing. The first qualification assigns a margin of
autonomy or independence to each subsystem in a culture, especially the
subsystem of disciplined thought and science; the second briefly acknowledges that a differentiated social structure as well as the dominant culture
mentality affects the development of knowledge. Both qualifications, and
particularly the first of these, are essential to a sound reading of Sorokin's
theory.
Possibly because Sorokin himself so often emphasizes the dependence
of everything in a sociocultural system upon its "cultural premises," critics
of his work understandably take him to subscribe to a doctrine of rigid
cultural determinism. The dominant emphasis overshadows the basic restriction upon this doctrine expressly introduced in the first chapter of his
Dynamics, where each subsystem of a sociocultural system is seen as
having a degree of autonomy or independence. Put most generally,
The autonomy of any system means ... the existence of some margin of choice
or selection on its part with regard to the infinitely great number of varying
17. Ibid., 2:455.
152
external agents and objects which may influence it. It will ingest some of these
and not others.... [O]ne of the most important "determinators" of the functioning and course of any system lies within the system itself, is inherent in it.
In this sense any inwardly integrated system is an autonomous self-regulating,
self-directing, or, if one prefers, "equilibrated" unity.... This is one of the
specific aspects of the larger principle which may be called "immanent selfregulation and self-direction." 18
The problem then becomes one of developing a theory adequate to account for the different "margins" of autonomy possessed by various kinds
of institutions and other subsystems. So far as we can see, this is another
gap-in our accounting, the third gap-in Sorokin's theory as it now
stands. Apart from the roughly ascertainable fact that particular institutions have a smaller or greater measure of independence of their social
and cultural environments, there seems nothing in the theory to help us
anticipate how this will turn out for various kinds of institutional spheres
in various kinds of sociocultural systems.
With regard to this problem, Sorokin would seem to hold a position
formally (not of course substantively) like that adopted by Marx and
Engels. In view of Sorokin's well-known opposition to Marxist theory,
this statement may at first seem to be implausible, not to say extravagant.
Yet when theorists are confronted with the same problem, they not infrequently converge in their formal analysis of it, however much they may
differ in their substantive conclusions. And this, it seems to us, is the case
with Marx and Sorokin in their treatment of the relative autonomy of institutional spheres within society. Consider only these few parallelisms of
formal analysis.
Just as Sorokin in the main makes his culture mentalities the effective
determinant of what develops in a sociocultural system, so, of course, Marx
makes the "relations of production" the "real foundation" which "determines the general character of the social, political and intellectual processes
of life." 19 Substantively, Marx and Sorokin could not be farther apart:
Marx adopts a "materialistic" position in the sense of the social relations
of production largely determining the superstructure of ideas; 20 Sorokin
adopts an "idealistic" position in which the underlying premises and cultural mentality largely determine the general character of the society and
culture, including its social relations. But both agree on the formal position
of positing primary social or cultural determinants that nevertheless leave
18. Ibid., 1:50-51.
19. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago:
C. H. Kerr, 1904), pp. 11-12.
20. As a reminder of his strongest formulation, we have only to read the sentence
that follows the passage quoted from Marx in the above text "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their [social] existence, but on the contrary, their
social existence determines their consciousness."
153
154
nomic sphere and approaches that of pure abstract ideology, the more shall
we find it exhibiting accidents [that is, deviations from "the expected"]
in its development, the more will its curve run in zig-zag." 24 This suggestion still leaves open the difficult question of how to find out the "distance"
of each institutional sphere from the economic sphere. But if Engels left
the problem unresolved, so, too, it seems, does Sorokin.
That this is so is further suggested by Sorokin's passing observations
on the independent functions of science in any sociocultural system. After
pointing out that a society like the United States has a "highly integrated
and differentiated system of science," while primitive societies have "little
developed" systems of science, 25 he notes: "But in some form science will
be found as a system in any culture area, because [note the functional
assumption] any social group, as long as it lives, must have and does have
a minimum of knowledge of the world that surrounds it, of the phenomena
and objects that are important for its survival and existence. No group
entirely devoid of any knowledge can exist and survive for any length of
time." 26 It is not the functional assumption of some indispensable minimum
of authentic knowledge that concerns us here; rather, it is that this assumption ascribes an independent function to "science" in every society, so
that we see Sorokin once again implying that science is not merely the
reflection of the culture mentality but has its own functional basis as well.
After this extended discussion of the principle of autonomy of subsystems in Sorokin's theory and of the unfilled gap in that theory, we may
turn for a moment to the second of his restrictions on the cultural determination of science. This must be brief, not because we consider it unimportant, but because, as we have intimated in the foregoing section,
Sorokin has elected to give it only fleeting attention in his own work. This
restriction upon the determination of thought by the general culture mentality deals with the connections between the internal differentiation of the
social structure and the character of the diversified thought that obtains
in the society. It deals, in the language of the foregoing section, with problems in the microsociology of science rather than its macrosociology.
Symptomatically enough, Sorokin touches upon this only in a long footnote. Moreover, the note is not in his Dynamics where he most fully develops his sociology of knowledge and science but in his later general
introduction to sociology, Society, Culture and Personality. Only there,
24. Engels to Starkenburg, 25 January 1894, in Marx, Selected Works, 1: 393.
25. As Sorokin informs us, he uses the term "science" as a shorthand expression
for science-and-technology. In this passage he is evidently concerned with the low
technology of everyday life in nonliterate societies rather than with science, strictly
speaking.
26. Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4:111.
155
156
151
158
There is neither need nor space to report the limitations of his quantitative indicators as these are set out by Sorokin. 31 In any event, he
concludes that, whatever their limitations, the indicators provide a valid
and reliable measure of fluctuations in the rate of scientific discovery and
technological invention as well as of other intellectual and artistic expressions of the culture. That is why he is prepared to assert that "Not only
do the first principles and categories of human thought fluctuate, but also
most of the scientific theories of a more or less general nature." 32 Plainly,
he bases his empirical conclusions very largely upon these cultural statistics.
In view of the basic part played by these statistics in his sociology of
knowledge, Sorokin adopts a curiously ambivalent attitude toward them.
This can be seen in his approval of the remark by Robert E. Park that his
statistics are merely a concession to the prevailing sensate mentality and
that "if they want 'em, let 'em have 'em." 33 Park's facetious remark was
not intended to obscure the symptomatic nature of Sorokin's fundamental
ambivalence toward criteria of scientific validity, an ambivalence deriving
from his effort to cope with quite disparate "systems of truth." In view of
the vast effort that went into compiling the cultural statistics that underlie
Sorokin's work in the sociology of science, it seems safe to say that these
systematic data were designed as more than mere trappings considered
necessary to "convince the vulgar." The fact is that Sorokin's empirical
descriptions are very largely based on these statistics. They are essential
to his argument. To remove them would not be to remove a fa~tade,
leaving the essential structure of his theory intact; it would be to undercut
his macrosociological theory of science and to leave it suspended in the
thin air of unrestrained speculation.
This, then, leads to another, the fourth, question and this one twopronged. In view of Sorokin's ambivalence toward social and cultural
statistics, about which we shall have more to say, we must ask: What is
his current and perhaps consolidated position with regard to the place of
such statistics in sociological inquiry, primarily in the sociology of science
and, by implication, in other branches of sociology as well? Further, how
does his discussion of this question help clarify his position on the criteria
of scientific truth which he adopts: does he regard systematic evidence
of the kind caught up in his statistics as merely a mode of communication
to his scientific compeers in a sensate culture or as a substantial basis both
for confirming and developing his theory?
It is these cultural statistics, moreover, that serve to highlight once
again two of the principal questions that we consider still unresolved in
31. Ibid., pp. 125-31.
32. Ibid., p. 439.
33. Sorokin, Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time (New York: Russell and Russell,
1964), p. 95n. See also chapter 1 in this volume.-ED.
Sorokin~s
159
160
sociology can be, and have been, abused is surely not in question, any
more than that qualitative methods, based on ill-devised and ill-confirmed
impressions, can be and have been abused. And surely, no sober man will
declare himself in favor of faulty craftsmanship, unsound assumptions, and
mistaken inferences. The question is therefore not one of identifying this
or that case of a fallacy in quantitative analysis in sociology but, rather,
one of setting out the criteria and limits of sound quantitative analysis.
And since so much of Sorokin's work in the sociology of science is pervaded by empirically grounded statistics, this question becomes thoroughly
germane to our discussion.
What, then, are Sorokin's criteria for the appropriate use of social and
cultural statistics? We find it decidedly easier to raise the question than to
answer it. Indeed, we raise the question in the hope that Sorokin will seize
upon the dialogue in the Allen volume devoted to his work as an occasion
for giving his pointed and definite answer to it. This becomes all the more
pertinent when we find that some authors are prepared to adopt an even
more extreme perspective on social and cultural statistics than Sorokin's
own. Werner Stark, for example, says of Sorokin's Dynamics that
our criticism ... is one of principle. His whole procedure assumes a radice the
possibility of quantifying what is qualitative, and this is almost like supposing
it is possible to square the circle. A book, or a work of art, is all quality [n.b.],
because it is all spirit. . . . It is to be feared that the sociology of knowledge
will never be able to get much assistance from statistical techniques. Much as
we may regret the fact, it will always have to rely heavily on the more
cumbersome monographic and descriptive methods. ss
The issue is even more stark than Stark apparently supposes. For
everyone in his senses would agree that what is "inherently" and "exclusively qualitative" cannot, by definition, be quantified. It is really
asking too much to ask us to reject a strict tautology. But when we get
down to cases, the crucial question, of course, is begged by such an affirmation; the question is precisely one of establishing criteria of what is
irrefragably qualitative and of what, in some aspect and degree, can be
reasonably and usefully quantified. And since, in our opinion, Sorokin has
wisely and justifiably counted aspects of complex works of science and
art, it would be helpful to have him clarify the sense in which he found
these to be quantifiable.
Sorokin's restatement of his position on the issue of such quantification
would be particularly instructive in view of what he has said about the
issue in his Fads and Foibles. At one place in that work, for example, he
declares that
35. Stark, Sociology of Knowledge, p. 280.
161
only through direct empathy, co-living and intuition of the psychosocial states
can one grasp the essential nature and differences . . . of religious, scientific,
aesthetic, ethical, legal, economic, technological, and other cultural valuesystems and their subsystems. Without the direct living experience of these
cultural values, they will remain terra incognita for our outside observer and
statistical analyst. . . . These methods are useless in understanding the nature
and difference between, say, Plato's and Kant's systems of philosophy, between
the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount and the ethics of hate, between Euclidean and Lobachevskian geometry and between different systems of ideas generally. Only after successfully accomplishing the mysterious inner act of
"understanding" each system of ideas or values, can one classify them into
adequate classes, putting into one class all the identical ideas, and putting into
different classes different ideas or values. Only after that, can one count them,
if they are countable, and perform other operations of a mathematical or
statistical nature, if they are possible. Otherwise, all observations and statistical
operations are doomed to be meaningless, fruitless, and fallacious simulacra of
real knowledge. 36
It would no doubt be generally agreed that a proper understanding of
cultural content is required for it to be validly classified so that specimens
in each class can then be counted. The vast compilations and counts of
such data in the Dynamics testify that Sorokin also thinks this can be
done. But is it not too stringent a criterion to require a "direct living
experience of the cultural values" 37 in order for them to be classified and
counted? Some substantial knowledge about the materials in hand is of
course necessary but this would seem to fall far short of the extreme
requirement exacted by Sorokin. We cannot assume that all of Sorokin's
research associates and assistants had a "direct living experience" of the
many thousands of scientific discoveries, technological inventions, philosophical doctrines, and art objects which they classified and counted in
order to provide an empirical test of Sorokin's ideas. It is certain that one
of his research assistants, R. K. Merton, had no such demanding experience of the almost thirteen thousand discoveries and inventions he computed on the basis of the Darmstadter Handbuch, just as it is probable
that J. W. Boldyreff, another of his assistants, had no such experience of
the thousands of scholars, scientists, artists, statesmen, and so on, mentioned in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, who were
classified and assigned weights on the basis of the amount of space devoted
to them in the Encyclopaedia.
Nevertheless, there is internal evidence that these counts were not
vitiated by limited knowledge (though, we suggest, knowledge enough for
36. Sorokin, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology (Chicago: Henry Regnery,
1956), pp. 160-61.
162
the purpose in hand). For independent classifications and counts of different but theoretically related materials produced much the same empirical results. As Sorokin reports for one such case dealing with data on
the "empirical system of truth (of senses)" and data on the rate of scientific
discovery:
The items and the sources were entirely different and the computations were
made by different persons who were not aware of the work of the other computers. (Professors Lossky and Lapshin had no knowledge of my study, and
Dr. Merton, who made the computation of the scientific discoveries, was unaware not only of my study but also of the computations made by Professors
Lossky and Lapshin.) Under the circumstances, the agreement between the
curve of the scientific discoveries and inventions and the curve of the fluctuations of the influence of the system of truth of senses is particularly strong
evidence that the results obtained in both cases are neither incidental nor
misleading. 38
In a word, the quantification of cultural contents cannot, need not, and
is not intended to reproduce the entire complex whole of each item entering
into the computation. Only selected aspects and attributes are classified
and counted. And for this purpose, full, detailed, and empathic understanding of each cultural item is not, apparently, required. It would therefore be instructive to have Sorokin redirect his attention to the seeming
discrepancy between the actual practice employed in quantifying cultural
items in the Dynamics and the far more demanding criteria for such quantification proposed in the Fads and Foibles. What Sorokin actually does
in the one case seems to us more compelling than what he says in the other.
In making this observation, we only adopt and adapt the sage advice of
Albert Einstein: "If you want to find out anything from the theoretical
physicists about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one
principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds. " 39
All this allows us to note that not the least advance in sociology during
the last century or so is reflected in the growing recognition that even
crude quantitative data can serve the intellectual purpose of enabling the
sociologist to reject or to modify his initial hypotheses when they are in
fact defective. To see this change in outlook we have only to contrast the
encyclopedic efforts of a Comte with those of a Sorokin. Comte handles
scattered facts gingerly and infrequently, as though they were unfamiliar
and even dangerous things; he does not think of so assembling systematic
arrays of data that they could, in principle, put his intuitive or reasoned
guesses to the test of empirical reality. Sorokin drenches us in quantitative
facts-for example, in the Dynamics, but not only there-and thus provides both himself and his readers with the occasion for matching theoret38. Social and Cultural Dynamics, 2:20.
39. The World as I See It (New York: Philosophical Library, 1934), p. 30.
163
ical expectations and empirical data. This practice would seem particularly
required when scholars turn to the sociological drama of large-scale
changes in the cultures and social structures that make up the framework
of world history. For entirely qualitative claims to facts prove to be excessively pliable, easily bent to fit the requirements of a comprehensive
theory. But if it is to be more than a dogma, a theory must state the
empirical observations that will be taken to disprove it or, at least, to
require its substantial revision. Independently collected, systematic and
quantitative data supply the most demanding test called for by such an
empirically-connected theory. And that Sorokin also thinks this to be the
case seems implied by the way in which he has gone about his task of
conducting empirical inquiries in the sociology of science.
164
165
idea. (Remember only Kekule's dream and intuited imagery of the benzene ring which converted the idea of the mere number of atoms in a
molecule into the structural idea of their being arranged in a pattern
resulting from the valences of different kinds of atoms.) But whatever the
source, the idea itself must be explored in terms of its implications and
these implications then examined in terms of how far they hold empirically.
To put the issue directly and so to afford Sorokin an' occasion in this
dialogue for further clarifying his position, we suggest that, whatever
asides may be tucked away in footnotes, Sorokin adopts, in the course of
his inquiries in the sociology of science, a thoroughgoing commitment to
the combined criteria of internal consistency and empirical observation that
are the mark of scientific work in our sensate age.
Sorokin's image of sensate science notwithstanding, the fact is that
concepts and rules of reasoning are no mere props in modern science. They
are as indispensable as the testimony of the senses. We call only one
witness, although many more are waiting in the corridors of today's science:
Our experience hitherto justifies us in believing that nature is the realization of
the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas. I am convinced that we can
discover by means of purely mathematical constructions the concepts and the
laws connecting them with each other, which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomenena. Experience may suggest the appropriate
mathematical concepts, but they most certainly cannot be deduced from it.
Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of the physical utility of a
mathematical construction. But the creative principle resides in mathematics.
In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality,
as the ancients dreamed.
This is not the voice of the thirteenth-century Robert Grosseteste speaking;
it is the voice of the decidedly twentieth-century Albert Einstein. 44
Moreover, as the history of science during the last centuries testifies,
not only can empirical data challenge established concepts and theories,
but concepts and theories often challenge the superficial testimony of the
senses. It is a familiar part of everyday practice in science to reject misleading empirical impressions when these run counter to theories that have
themselves been firmly embedded in scientific thought. Any sharp separation of reason and empirical data in contemporary science must therefore
distort much of the operative reality. Work in the scientific laboratory
rests upon both, with one or the other raising questions that must be
resolved by a congruence between them. Only then is there a reasonable
prospect that an idea or a finding will enter permanently into the repertory
of science. And this sensate conception of science, we suggest, is basic to
Sorokin's own work, his incidental disclaimers notwithstanding. This, at
44. Einstein, The World as I See It, pp. 36-37.
166
least, is a sixth puzzle which Sorokin might helpfully unravel in his part
of the dialogue.
167
168
50. In less passionate prose than he employed in his lecture, Sorokin wrote in
1937: "Suppose someone should discover a simple but terrific explosive which could
easily destroy a considerable part of our planet. Scientifically, it would be the greatest
169
170
It makes us think once again about some of the physical world. Intuition,
common sense-they are neatly stood on their heads. The result is usually
known as the contradiction of parity. 54
That each such advance in science enlarges our awareness of how little
is still known is a judgment that has been endlessly reiterated by scientists,
particularly the greatest among them. 55 But this does seem far removed
from the portrait of uncertainty and confusion among scientists painted by
Sorokin. In any case, it would be instructive to have him restate the place
occupied by the fact of the accumulation of scientific knowledge in his
macrosociological theory of science.
171
172
Social and
Cultural
Contexts of
Science
1970
174
between science and society only when science itself came to be widely
regarded as something of a social problem or as a prolific source of social
problems. That crude prognosis has since been borne out by developments
of the last decade or so.
This fairly recent emergence of a distinct interest in the sociology of
science is the principal reason for my agreeing, not without qualms, to the
issuing in book form of a monograph first published more than thirty
years ago. My misgivings have been somewhat allayed by the circumstance
that both historians and sociologists of science continue to discuss and
criticize it. In his comprehensive article on the history of science in the
new International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, for one instance,
Thomas S. Kuhn argued that the monograph sets forth a conception of
how "the larger culture impinges on scientific development" that needs to
be incorporated in the new "direction in which the history of science must
now develop." And in his vigorous and conscientious critique of the monograph, A. Rupert Hal!2 went on to express the hope that it "mighf be
speedily reprinted." Promptly suiting my action to these words only six
years later, here it is.
Looking back at this Jugendwerk, hopefully without the condescension
that age so often adopts toward youth, I must say, in all candor, that the
cadence of its prose does not give me much pleasure. But if its style is stiff
and self-conscious, the exposition is, to give the author his due, reasonably
clear. I can find few murky passages in it, although a fair number of turgid
ones.
When it comes to the substance of the monograph, I do not consider
it at all evident that I am now more competent to gauge its merits and
flaws. True, I am the beneficiary of the scholarship that has since examined
the questions it treats and, more particularly, of the articles and books that
have been addressed to the monograph itself. But the author was far more
continuously immersed in the prime facts of the historical case as he sifted
and organized them in the course of intensive inquiry than I can possibly
be. It is possible, however, to compensate for this deficiency in two respects. I can draw upon the advantage of hindsight to examine briefly
the problems and ideas advanced in the study that have enduring interest
for us today, partly as a result of the intervening scholarship of historians
and sociologists of science, partly as a result of recent conspicuous changes
in the relations of science to its social and cultural contexts. And nothing
helps one quite so much to acquire a degree of detachment from one's
own work as having survived its first appearance by several decades.
In their most general aspect, the principal questions raised in this study
2. "Merton Revisited, Or, Science and Society in the Seventeenth Century," History of Science: An Annual Review 2 ( 1963): 1-16.
175
are with us still. What are the modes of interplay between society, culture,
and science? Do these vary in kind and extent in differing historical contexts? What makes for those sizable shifts in recruitment to the intellectual
disciplines-the various sciences and humanities-that lead to great variations in their development? Among those engaged in the work of science,
what makes for shifts in the foci of inquiry: from one science to another
and, within each of the sciences, from one set of problems to another?
Under which conditions are changes in the foci of attention the planned
results of deliberate policy, and under which the largely unanticipated
consequences of value commitments among scientists and those controlling
the support of science? How did these matters stand while science was
being institutionalized and how do they stand since its thoroughgoing institutionalization? And once science has evolved forms of internal organization, how do patterns and rates of social interaction among scientists
affect the development of scientific ideas? How does a cultural emphasis
upon social utility as a prime, let alone an exclusive, criterion for scientific
work variously affect the rate and direction of advance in science?
These are plainly questions of enough generality to be addressed to
every society and historical epoch where an appreciable number of people
are at work in science. What the author of this monograph undertook,
with all the uninhibited innocence of youth, was to pose these general questions for the historically specific case of seventeenth-century England, all
unknowing that these questions would have continuing relevance for an
understanding of the place of science in society and for its internal workings. The theoretical mode in which he attacked these questions still holds
a certain interest.
A principal sociological idea governing this empirical inquiry holds that
the socially patterned interests, motivations, and behavior established in
one institutional sphere-say, that of religion or economy-are interdependent with the socially patterned interests, motivations, and behavior
obtaining in other institutional spheres-say, that of science. There are
various kinds of such interdependence, but we need touch upon only one
of these here. The same individuals have multiple social statuses and roles:
scientific and religious and economic and political. This fundamental linkage in social structure in itself makes for some interplay between otherwise
distinct institutional spheres even when they are segregated into seemingly
autonomous departments of life. Beyond that, the social, intellectual, and
value consequences of what is done in one institutional domain ramify
into other institutions, eventually making for anticipatory and subsequent
concern with the interconnections of institutions. Separate institutional
spheres are only partially autonomous, not completely so. It is only after
a typically prolonged development that social institutions, including the
institutions of science, acquire a significant degree of autonomy.
176
In its bare bones, this conception of the interdependence of social institutions is plainly not a new idea-no more when this study was first carried
out than now. All the same, it is an idea that has still not been thoroughly
worked out in its many implications. Even now, there are scholars who
would argue that science goes its own way, unaffected by changes in the
environing social structure. Moreover, this is an idea that has often been
distorted into a doctrine of "factors" in social development: of social,
economic, religious, political, military, technological, and scientific factors
in this or that historical society. It is an idea that has also been stretched
into doctrines of universally dominant factors resulting in claims to "the
economic determination of historical change," or its "technological determination" or "political determination," as the case may be.
It is now quite evident to me and I hope will become evident to its
readers that this inquiry into the interdependence of science and other
institutional spheres in seventeenth-century England neither adopts a factor
theory nor supposes that the character of interchanges between institutional spheres that occurred in that period is much the same in other
cultures and other times. Rather, it states in so many words that the nature
and extent of these interchanges differ in various societies, depending on
the state of their science and of their institutional systems of economy,
politics, religion, military, and so on. This should not come as a strange
idea. After all, the relations between science, economy, and government
in England of the seventeenth century, when modem science and its technological offshoots were only in their beginning, differ palpably from their
relations in the twentieth-century United States or Soviet Union, where
science has long been institutionalized, where scientific research requires
vast support, and where it has acquired new magnitudes of consequence
for technologies of production and destruction. The recent highly publicized discovery of the industrial-military-scientific complex only brings to
our notice tendencies toward the interdependence of science and other
social institutions that have, to a degree, been present all along. That, at
least, is the import of the chapters in this monograph that examine the
relations of science and technology with economic development and military technique.
Another aspect of this case study in the historical sociology of science
should be noted here if only because the author did not emphasize it
enough to ensure its being brought to the reader's notice. By inquiring
into the reciprocal relations between science, as an ongoing intellectual
activity, and the environing social and cultural structure, the monograph
managed to bypass the then current tendency--one still marked today in
some quarters of historical and sociological scholarship--of giving uneven
attention to the distinct directions of that reciprocity, with the impact of
science (and of science-based technology) upon society eliciting much
177
attention, and the impact of society upon science very little. The study
takes seriously the notion of institutional interchange as it abandons the
easy assumption of exclusively one-sided impact.
In this short preface, I should like, whenever possible, to give the author
the benefit of the doubt. That is why I do not outline the book in detail,
assuming that the structure and substance of the argument have been set
out clearly enough for the reader to grasp them without great difficulty.
Nevertheless, the published responses of scholars to the book through the
years occasionally lead me to doubt this assumption. These responses seldom attend to the total structure of the inquiry. I should estimate that
some nine of every ten discussions of the book (listed in the bibliography
of commentaries and continuities in this volume) have centered on just
one part of it, the one dealing with the interrelations between Puritanism
and the institutionalization of science. This concentration of attention
creates something of a puzzle, as can be seen when I employ the device
of quantitative content analysis which George Sarton was so fond of. In
his unique Introduction to the History of Science, whose three volumes in
five books and 4,243 pages take us from the ninth century B.c. to the end
of the fourteenth century A.D., Sarton would repeatedly assay the structure
of a work by indicating the amount of space devoted to each of its constituent parts, just as he would quantify its citations to previous works as
one way of establishing its intellectual heritage. (He could not be expected
to foresee that computerized citation indices would become an important
tool for the sociological analysis of contemporary scientific development.)
Adapting the Sartonian procedure of quantitative content analysis to the
structure of the monograph, we arrive at this arithmetical distribution:
Subject
Recruitment to various occupational fields and shifts
of interest among the sciences (chaps. 2, 3)
Puritanism and science hypothesis (chaps. 4-6)
Economic and military influences on spectrum of
scientific investigation (chaps. 7-10
and Appendix A)
Population, social interaction, and science (chap. 11)
Number
of Pages
Percentage
of Content
52
82
20
32
91
30
255
36
12
100
178
179
180
than relying wholly on selected bits and scraps of evidence that too often
catch the scholar's eye simply because they are consistent with his ideas.
This refers, in particular, to statistics put together by the historical sociologist, and rather less to the statistics generated by the social, political, or
economic system of the time which are then reproduced and put to analytical use by the investigator.
Beyond its use of historical quantification, this monograph has not
exactly suffered from inattention. Yet, in spite of all the excellent reasons
for critically considering its other thematics, the scholars who turned their
attention to it at all generally preferred, as noted earlier, to center on the
hypotheses of linkages between. Puritanism and science. Had educated
and articulate Puritans of the seventeenth century been social scientists,
they would have found this focus of interest passing strange. For they took
it almost as self-evident that science made not for the dethronement of
God but rather provided a means of celebrating His wisdom and the tidiness
of the universe He had created.
What, then, has converted the commonplace of that time into the
paradox of this time? Here is an adventitious clue. It happens that this
dissertation was written in a university which, if I may put it so, enjoys a
distinctly Puritan heritage, although it was written at a time when that
heritage was no longer omnipresent and controlling. Indeed, the section
of the dissertation dealing with Puritanism focused on what then seemed
to many an improbable, not to say absurd, relation between religion and
science. At least among those who had been reared on such positivistic
works as John W. Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and
Science and A. D. White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, it was widely believed, as some still believe, that the prime historical
relation between religion and science is bound to be one of conflict. An
abundance of historical evidence testified that history is chock full of conflict between the two: witness only the heretical shades of Giordano Bruno
and Michael Servetus. In good positivistic style, then, it was only a short
leap from such empirical episodes of conflict to a belief in the logical and
historical necessity for conflict. Since science was engaged in assaulting
the dogmatic assumptions about reality that were tucked away in theology
and associated religious beliefs and practices, or was, at least, busily
nibbling away at these assumptions, a state of war between the two was
constrained to be continuous and inevitable. The only concession made
by scholars holding this view was that, on occasion, the inherently opposed
forces of science and religion were accommodated each to the other in an
effort to dampen the intensity of that warfare.
Quite another kind of interplay between seventeenth-century ascetic
Protestantism and the contemporary science was conceived of in this study.
It was proposed that Puritanism inadvertently contributed to the legitimacy
181
182
book would have him maintain, that, without Puritanism, there could have
been no concentrated development of modern science in seventeenth-century England. Such an imputation betrays a basic failure to understand
the logic of analysis and interpretation in historical sociology. In such
analysis, a particular concrete historical development cannot be properly
taken as indispensable to other concurrent or subsequent developments.
In the case in hand, it is certainly not the case that Puritanism was indispensable in the sense that if it had not found historical expression at that
time, modern science would not then have emerged. The historically concrete movement of Puritanism is not being put forward as a prerequisite
to the substantial thrust of English science in that time; other functionally
equivalent ideological movements could have served to provide the emerging science with widely acknowledged claims to legitimacy. The interpretation in this study assumes the functional requirement of providing
socially and culturally patterned support for a not yet institutionalized
science; it does not presuppose that only Puritanism could have served
that function. As it happened, Puritanism provided major (not exclusive)
support in that historical time and place. But that does not make it indispensable. However, and this requires emphasis, neither does this functional conception convert Puritanism into something epiphenomenal and
inconsequential. It, rather than conceivable functional alternatives, happened to advance the institutionalization of science by providing a substantial basis for its legitimacy. But the imputed drastic simplification that
would make Puritanism historically indispensable only affords a splendid
specimen of the fallacy of misplaced abstraction (rather than concreteness). It would mistakenly have the author undertake an exercise in historical prophecy (to adopt the convenient term that Karl Popper uses to
describe efforts at concrete historical forecasts and retrodictions), even
though the much less assuming author himself has only tried his hand at
an analytical interpretation in the historical sociology of science.
This brings us directly to a principal assumption underlying the entire
book. The substantial and persistent development of science occurs only
in societies of a certain kind, which provide both cultural and material
conditions for that development. This becomes particularly evident in the
early days of modern science before it was established as a major institution with its own, presumably manifest, value. Before it became widely
accepted as a value in its own right, science was required to justify itself
to men in terms of values other than that of knowledge itself. This underlying idea unites the several themes of the monograph, the one dealing
with the role of Puritanism and the other with the role of economic and
military utilities in the institutionalization of science. When the author,
who now has my belated sympathy, brought these two themes together,
they seemed strange bedfellows indeed. Commentators who concern them-
183
184
185
that the race for priority might constitute a strategic subject for study,
providing clues to the ways in which the institution of science shapes the
motives, passions, and social relations of scientists. So far as I can tell,
the youthful author of that footnote proved to be its only reader. At any
rate, no one, not even he, heeded the muted clarion call. Slowly it dawned
upon him that although it was well enough for others to ignore the plain
wisdom of this prescription, he, at least, was obliged to take his own
medicine. Some ten years ago I first tried to make amends for this lapse
of two decades and have since examined the import of priority races for
an understanding of both the institution of science and the behavior of
scientists.
Ethnocentric glory, then, as well as the other diverse expressions of
utilitarianism, provided a substantial basis for legitimatizing early modem
science. In those days, little thought was given to the possibility that a
major accent on the utility of science might eventually confine the free
play of the scientific imagination. But perhaps it is just as well that men
do not commonly attend to the historically distant, accumulative consequences of current commitments, or human action might be altogether
paralyzed. Before science had acquired a substantial autonomy as an institution, it needed those extraneous sources of legitimation. It was only
later that this dependence of science upon other institutionalized values
began slowly to change. Science gradually acquired an increasing degree
of autonomy, claiming legitimacy as something good in its own right, just
as much so as literature and the other arts, as the quest for physical wellbeing or for personal salvation. The autonomous case for pure science
evolved out of the derivative case for applied science. The new attitude
is reflected in Ben Franklin's reply to the question put to him about the
use of a new discovery: "What good is a newborn baby?"-a reply echoed
by Pasteur and Faraday in the century to come, but not one readily brought
to mind in the century before. The new attitude expresses a double confidence: that fundamental scientific knowledge is a self-contained good and
that, as a surplus value, it will in due course lead to all manner of practical
consequences serving the other varied interests of man.
The emphases upon the intrinsic and the utilitarian rationales for basic
science have since varied as changing social circumstances invited differing
strategy and tactics for maintaining legitimacy and enlisting support. The
changing visible social consequences of science have served to shift these
emphases, as we can observe in today's world. The pressing claims for the
social utility of science-or to use the catchword, its "relevance"-perhaps
foreshadow a new epoch limiting the spectrum of scientific inquiry. But in
the seventeenth century, the sometimes excessive claims for the utilities
of science were mainly prelude to its institutionalization. Once science was
established with a degree of functional autonomy, the doctrine of basic
186
187
that these previous counts are hopelessly awry: that, in truth, of the one
hundred nineteen members of the Royal Society in June 1663, "adherents
to the Puritan ethics [sic]" can be counted, quite literally, on the fingers
of one hand. For the rest, about whom there is enough information to
judge, the great majority-forty-three or fifty or fifty-four of them (the
figures vary a bit on page 421 of the Feuer book)-were what he describes
as "hedonist-libertarians." This report naturally invites the nagging suspicion that something has gone wrong, badly wrong, somewhere. How can
this new arithmetical result be so wholly at odds with the earlier ones?
A detailed answer would run beyond the limits of this preface. It would
require a report, case by case, of Feuer's sortings and countings. But we
can, in passing, take note of how he reaches his extraordinary results.
On the road to his concluding statistics, Feuer alerts us by engaging in
straightforward misquotation, with this monograph as the victim. To exhibit this particular art, we adopt the age-old practice-it was already
prevalent in the seventeenth century-of reproducing the text which Mr.
Feuer ostensibly quotes and his distinctively private version of it.
Merton Text
Feuer "Quotation"
"It is hardly a fortuitous circumstance," writes Merton, "that the leading figures of the [n.b.] nuclear group
were divines and eminently religious
men ... " [the ellipsis and deletion are
wholly Mr. Feuer's]. The largest active professional group in the Royal
Society, on the contrary, was that of
the physicians ... [the ellipsis here is
entirely mine]. How many divines, on
the other hand, were there among the
founders of the Royal Society? (pp.
68-69)
188
venient ellipsis to excise from the original text the very conclusion at which
he is to arrive himself. After this skillful bit of surgery, nothing more is
needed than to proceed with the count showing that divines did not in
truth predominate. Like most of us who are a little partial to our own
ideas, the author of the monograph would doubtless want to know why
Feuer responds to cogent reasoning with logic-chopping.
All this is foretaste to the agreeable elasticity of social arithmetic when
one arranges it so. Another feature of Feuer's brand of nose-counting is
that it takes all noses as being of a kind. He arrives at his dramatic results
by taking all Fellows of the Royal Society in 1663 as having equal weight
for the hypothesis under review. His list includes all courtiers-whether or
not they had given any evidence of an interest, let alone an understanding
of science-who could enter at will into that royally sponsored fellowship.
Historians of science have ordinarily been a little more discriminating.
Charles C. Gillispie (for one) has noted that "For various obscure legal
reasons, the 115 names listed in the Royal Society's second charter,
granted on May 20, 1663, constitute the officially recognized original
Fellows." But as an historian rather than a legalist, he goes on to note
that the list included substantial numbers who could be admitted at once
to the fellowship simply because "they were of, or above, the degree of
barons." Unlike the rest, these were not first scrutinized for evidence of
scientific competence or even of interest in science. 10 Once having elected
to include these courtly royalists in the relevant population, Feuer could
proceed with confidence to arrive at the guaranteed but not altogether
relevant results.
Still, all this is only preliminary to the final expedient that leads inescapably to the finding that "the dominant ethic of the membership as a
whole of the Royal Society on May 20, 1663, was not that of the Puritan
virtues; it was hedonist-libertarian." The criteria of hedonist-libertarianism
might seem elastic and loose enough to serve the purpose. Even so, Feuer
10. Christopher Hill, ("The Intellectual Origins of the Royal Society-London or
Oxford," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 23 [December 1968]:
144-56) has lately described the functions of this practice: "Wilkins had presented
Oxford's congratulations to Oliver Cromwell when he became Lord Protector, and
himself married Cromwell's sister. We can see why it was necessary that 'our company at Gresham College,' in Wallis's words, should be 'much again increased by the
accession of divers eminent and noble persons upon his Majesty's return.' The first
President of the Society was a peer who had some scientific pretensions but would
scarcely have obtained the office for that reason alone. Peers were admitted to Fellowships without scrutiny, and the door was opened wide to gentlemanly amateurs.
The ultimate results of this social dilution were unhappy; but in the short run it won
Charles II's patronage for the Royal Society, which continued to be run by John
Wilkins, Cromwell's brother-in-law, and Henry Oldenburg, Cromwell's admirer." In
Feuer's accounting, of course, Oldenburg proudly emerges as a royalist and hedonistlibertarian, while Wilkins appears as merely a nonpartisan hedonist.
189
apparently does not regard this elasticity as enough to ensure the result.
For he goes on to include among the criteria of "hedonistic-libertarianism"
any expression of joy in scientific work. Once he has achieved this act of
definition in which the pleasures of scientific inquiry become just another
expression of "hedonism," he is plainly destined to arrive at the conclusion
that scientists in that time (and, one must add, in every other) are surely
committed to hedonism. The historian Donald Fleming says all this more
crisply:
It is only fair to emphasize that Feuer's quarrel with Calvinism is merely
incidental to his vindication of "hedonism" as the mainspring of science. In
this cause every scientist who ever drank a glass of beer or looked at a woman,
preferably both but one will do, becomes a "hedonist." Even by these standards,
Newton remains a problem; but Feuer endeavors to distract the reader's attention by a "liaison" between Newton's niece and a "notorious libertine." Where
everything else fails, Feuer counts as a hedonist anybody who ever said he
enjoyed doing science. 11
190
Changing Foci of
Interests in the
Sciences and
Technology
1938
Method of Study
An independent source of data which may afford a basis for answering
the first of these questions is the compilation by Ludwig Darmstiidter and
twenty-six associated scholars: Handbuch zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik. 1 This chronological list of important scientific
and technologic discoveries and inventions is far from exhaustive, but it
is the fullest list available. It contains occasional errors in the attribution
and dating of discoveries, 2 but these do not vitiate our use of this material,
Originally published, in a slightly different form, as "Foci and Shifts of Interest in
the Sciences and Technology," chapter 3 of Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology
and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (Bruges, Belgium: Saint Catherine
Press, Ltd., 1938); and with a new introduction (New York: Howard Fertig, Inc.,
and Harper and Row, 1970) pp. 38-54. Reprinted with permission.
1. Berlin: J. Springer, 1908.
2. Cf. George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science (Baltimore: Williams
and Wilkins, 1927-47), vol. 1 (1927), p. 144. Boris Weinberg, "Les lois d'evolution
des decouvertes de l'humanite," Revue generale des sciences 37 ( 1926): 43-44.
192
193
Number
1601-10
1611-20
1621-30
1631-40
1641-50
10
13
7
12
3
Years
Number
1651-60
1661-70
1671-80
1681-90
1691-1700
13
44
29
32
17
The contrast between the productivity of the two halves of the century
is marked: there are three times as many discoveries in the second half
as in the first. This coincides with the frequent observation by historians
of science that the advance of science in England became especially notable
during the latter half of the century. After a period of trendless fluctuation,
there is a pronounced increase in the number of important discoveries
during the decade 1661-70, after which productivity slackens considerably.
The low point in scientific output is understandably reached during the
period when the Civil Wars were rife. Wallis, Boyle, and others of their
company frequently remarked on the distracting influences of the wars.
The same pattern occurred during the internal disturbances engendered by
William's entry into England in 1688, as was observed by the editor of the
Philosophical Transactions when its interrupted publication was resumed:
"The Publication of these Transactions [has] for some time past been
suspended, chiefly by reason that the unsettled posture of Publick Affairs
did divert the thoughts of the curious towards Matters of more immediate
Concern than are Physical and Mathematical Enquiries." 5
Internal conflict evidently retarded the acceleration of scientific research
during the two middle decades of the century. The following decade,
marked by the undisturbed and enlarged interaction of scientists attendant
upon the inauguration of the Royal Society, was one of great scientific
5. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 17 (1693): 452.
194
activity. In fact, the cessation of the civil war as well as the great increase
of interest in science during the decades immediately preceding> probably
account for the marked and "sudden" appearance of fundamental discoveries in the sixties. The scientific movement had been gathering momentum for some time previous, but had been repressed by the uncertainties and disorders of the time of strife. 7
The reliability of this tabulation of Darmstadter data can be gauged by
comparing it with data concerning scientific interests derived from the
D.N.B. memoirs, set down in table 2.
TABLE 2
Number of Initial Interests in Science and Technology, England, 1601-1700
Years
Number
1601-10
1611-20
1621-30
1631-40
1641-50
17
18
23
39
46
Years
1651-60
1661-70
1671-80
1681-90
1691-1700
Number
46
41
43
38
35
195
But, as will be indicated presently, this process occurs only when there
are no shifts of interest from science to other fields of activity.
The foregoing data suggest that scientific development in England became especially marked about the middle of the seventeenth century. As
the late Martha Ornstein indicated in her exemplary study, 9 a dividing
line may be drawn at this point, for the forces in Western Europe that
produced the science of the early part of the century were different from
those that produced the science of the later part. This is true, a fortiori,
for England. The first period included Gilbert and Harvey, as well as that
peer of scientific propagandists, Francis Bacon, but science in the form of
a social movement did not develop until later. Beyond the coterie of great
names at this time was the popularity of science. The new experimental
philosophy became fashionable; aristocrats began to dabble in nature's
arcana. 10 The new-found popularity did not result in notable scientific
achievements, but it helped legitimatize the place of science.
Indices of Interest in the Sciences
Which shifts of attention occurred within the context of this enhanced
interest in science; what relative variations of interest were manifested in
the several sciences and technology? The best accessible indicators of such
shifts and variations can be derived from the only scientific journal published in seventeenth-century England: The Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society of London. But the Philosophical Transactions cannot
furnish indices of changing scientific interests during the first part of the
century since it began publication only in 1665, three years after the
official inauguration of the Royal Society. For only the latter part of the
century, then, will it be possible to gauge the reliability of these indicators
of shifting foci of scientific interest by comparing the data derived from
Darmstadter's Handbuch with the data derived from the Philosophical
Transactions.
The classification of sciences employed in the tabulation of articles in
the Transactions has been adapted from the "Systematic Classification"
developed by the editors of Isis.U Each article was taken as one unit and
classified in that field of science to which it chiefly pertained. 12 Reviews
9. The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1938 [first printed privately in 1913]), chap. 2.
10. Thomas Sprat described the change in these words: "It [science] has begun to
keep the best company, refine its fashion and appearance and become the employment of the rich and great, instead of being the subject of men's scorn" (The
History of the Royal-Society of London [London, 1667], p. 149).
11. Cf. Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Civilization, passim (for example, 19 [1933]: 431 ff).
12. Compare the methods used in Hornell Hart, "Changing Social Attitudes and
Interests," Recent Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 1:384 ff.;
196
0.
0.
0.
0.
A. Philosophy
B. Formal Sciences ....................
1. Logic and Epistemology ..........
2. Mathematics
C. Physical Sciences ...................
3. Astronomy
4. Physics .........................
5. Chemistry
6. Technology .....................
D. Biological Sciences .................
7. Biology
8. Botany .........................
9. Zoology ........................
E. Sciences of the Earth ..............
10. Geodesy ........................
11. Geography and Oceanography .....
12. Geology, Mineralogy, Paleontology .
13. Meteorology, Climatology .........
F. Anthropological Sciences (physical) ...
14. Anatomy .......................
15. Physiology ......................
G. Anthropological Sciences (cultural) ...
16. History and Archaeology ..........
17. Economics ......................
18. Philology .......................
19. Political Arithmetic ..............
H. Medical Sciences ...................
20. Pharmacy, Pharmacology .........
21. Medicine
I. Alia ...............................
Total ..............................
Fields of Interest
22
14
213
22
27
12
231
28
1
26
13
13
11
1
33
8
25
12
273
22
102
29
39
13
21
53
10
24
19
20
1
5
10
4
23
16
7
2
1
4
87
36
22
6
23
34
17
7
10
24
5
7
6
22
4
20
1
19
79
20
32
14
13
39
14
15
10
22
2
3
14
3
24
17
7
3
1
2
4
16
2
14
8
214
3
8
1
7
94
39
22
16
17
42
24
13
5
14
4
4
2
4
18
9
9
11
4
7
1671- 167473
76
166870
166567
TABLE 3
Classifications of Articles in Philosophical Transactions, 1665-1702
1
8
3
5
3
87
1
3
1
11
8
3
3
2
1
39
11
5
5
17
17
6
7
4
5
1
1
7
11
3
128
11
22
14
8
6
6
7
50
27
7
10
6
20
4
8
8
9
1
2
6
1677- 168178
83
30
7
256
30
-
9
110
29
34
16
31
26
7
5
14
21
3
3
10
5
33
24
9
19
15
1
9
2
2
3
12
2
10
5
107
2
11
2
7
5
2
8
3
2
29
6
7
7
9
29
8
14
7
15
23
12
114
23
4
6
4
14
8
6
7
7
4
1
43
6
37
16
260
13
59
15
23
12
9
55
16
20
19
34
2
8
9
15
28
19
9
12
7
13
11
16
3
6
2
5
17
7
5
5
14
11
2
6
31
4
27
15
147
4
22
4
5
7
6
34
11
16
7
8
1
3
1
3
20
9
11
13
5
1697- 17001702
66
107
2030
257
84
226
186
366
686
17
101
Total
0.
A. Philosophy ........................
B. Formal Sciences ....................
1. Logic and Epistemology ..........
2. Mathematics
C. Physical Sciences ...................
3. Astronomy .....................
4. Physics .........................
5. Chemistry . . 0. 0.
6. Technology .....................
D. Biological Sciences .................
7. Biology
8. Botany .........................
9. Zoology ........................
E. Sciences of the Earth ..............
I 0. Geodesy ........................
11. Geography and Oceanography .....
12. Geology, Mineralogy, Paleontology .
13. Meteorology, Climatology .........
F. Anthropological Sciences (physical) ...
14. Anatomy .......................
15. Physiology ......................
G. Anthropological Sciences (cultural) ...
16. History and Archaeology ..........
17. Economics ......................
18. Philology .......................
19. Political Arithmetic ..............
H. Medical Sciences ...................
20. Pharmacy, Pharmacology .........
21. Medicine .......................
I. Alia ...........................
Total ..............................
Fields of Interest
10.3
6.6
100.0
10.3
1.9
40.8
16.9
10.3
2.8
10.8
16.0
8.0
3.3
4.7
11.3
2.3
3.3
5.2
.5
12.2
6.1
6.1
.9
1.9
.9
11.7
4
11.3
5.2
100.0
1.7
8.6
.4
8.2
34.1
8.6
13.8
6.1
5.6
16.9
6.1
6.5
4.3
9.6
.9
1.3
6.1
1.3
10.4
7.4
3.0
1.3
.4
.4
12.1
2.9
9.2
4.4
100.0
8.0
37.4
10.6
14.3
4.8
7.7
19.5
3.7
8.8
7.0
7.4
.4
1.8
3.7
1.5
8.5
5.9
2.6
.8
.4
2.2
8.0
7.4
.9
6.5
3.7
100.0
1.4
3.7
.5
3.3
43.9
18.2
10.3
7.5
7.9
20.0
11.2
6.5
2.3
6.6
1.9
1.9
.9
1.9
8.4
4.2
4.2
5.2
1.9
3.3
167476
1.1
9.1
3.4
5.7
3.4
100.0
1.1
3.4
1.1
12.6
9.2
3.4
3.4
2.3
1.1
43.5
12.6
5.7
5.7
19.5
19.5
6.9
8.0
4.6
5.6
1.1
1.1
167778
8.6
2.3
100.0
8.6
-
17.2
10.9
6.3
4.7
4.7
5.5
39.1
21.1
5.5
7.8
4.7
15.7
3.1
6.3
6.3
7.1
.8
1.6
4.7
1.6
11.7
2.7
100.0
11.7
3.5
42.8
11.3
13.2
6.2
12.1
10.1
2.7
1.9
5.5
8.2
1.2
1.2
3.9
1.9
12.9
9.4
3.5
7.5
5.9
.4
3.5
5.5
168487
168183
TABLE 4
Indices of Interest in the Several Sciences, Philosophical Transactions, 1665-1702
1.9
1.9
2.8
11.2
1.9
9.3
4.7
100.0
1.9
10.3
1.9
6.6
4.7
1.9
7.5
2.8
1.9
27.0
5.6
6.5
6.5
8.4
31.1
7.5
17.1
6.5
14.1
169193
9.7
20.2
10.5
100.0
20.2
3.5
5.3
3.5
12.3
7.0
5.3
6.1
6.1
9.7
14.1
2.6
5.3
1.8
4.4
14.9
6.1
4.4
4.4
12.3
5.0
2.7
2.7
15.0
2.7
3.4
4.8
4.1
23.2
7.5
10.9
4.8
5.4
.7
2.0
.7
2.0
13.6
6.1
7.5
8.9
3.4
5.3
100.0
12.6
4.1
11.1
9.2
18.0
33.8
.9
5.0
Arith1700- me tic
1702 Mean
1.4
1.5
.4
4.1
21.1
16.5
2.7
2.3
14.2
18.4
10.2
6.2
100.0 100.0
5.0
22.7
5.8
8.8
4.6
3.5
21.2
6.2
7.7
7.3
13.2
.8
3.1
3.5
5.8
10.8
7.3
3.5
4.6
2.7
1694- 169796
99
199
200
Setting of a Problem
The data point to various trends in scientific interests during this period
which can be briefly summarized. In mathematics, as we have seen, there
are three short-time cycles. In the physical sciences there is a more or less
continuously sustained high degree of interest until 1684-87, when a perceptible decline sets in. Irvine Masson, the historian of chemistry, notes a
relapse in chemical investigation after Boyle's death;21 a short-term trend
which is reflected in our data. The biological sciences-natural history,
Withington, Medical History (London, 1894), p. 329: "The surgery of the seventeenth
century is much less important that that which came before or after it, for the
wonderful progress of physiology seems to have attracted the ablest minds to the
study of medical problems."
19. Christopher Wordsworth, Scholae Academicae, p. 66 ff.; William Whewell,
History of the Inductive Sciences, 2 vols. (New York, 1858), 1:349-50.
20. Partial corroboration of this trend is furnished by David Ogg who notes the
increased popular interest in history beginning with the late seventies. Cf. his
England in the Reign of Charles II, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 2:71415.
21. Irvine Masson, Three Centuries of Chemistry (London: E. Benn, 1925), p. 100.
201
Years
1665-67
1668-70
1671-73
1674-76
1677-78
1681-83
1684-87
1691-93
1694-96
1697-99
1700-1702
Sciences of Organic
Life (D + F +H)
Index of Attention
42.7
42.7
45.4
47.6
44.6
44.6
46.3
28.9
23.8
27.7
17.7
38.5
39.0
40.1
35.8
41.2
41.5
34.7
48.9
47.4
48.5
57.9
The letters B, C, and so on, refer to the categories in the preceding tables. The
figures are percentages of the total number of articles published in the Transactions.
The necessity for exercising care in the interpretation of these figures because of
the relative base is apparent.
202
the editors of the Transactions were members of the Royal Society who
were in direct touch with the leading scientists. Secondly, the articles were
contributed by the comparatively few investigators of the time and so, in
the nature of the case, would reflect their interests. Finally, much the same
results appear from independent sources.
A comparison of the data derived from the Philosophical Transactions
and from Darmstadter's Handbuch must be restricted to the rank order
of the various groups of sciences since the Darmstadter material does not
include enough English discoveries for this period to warrant comparison
either by specific sciences or by yearly periods. However, since it is the
reliability of the generalized picture of shifts of scientific interests which
is in question, this is not a cramping restriction. The comparison is shown
in Table 6. 22
TABLE 6
Relative Interest in the Various Sciences, England, 1665-1702
Philosophical
Transactions
Darmstadter
Total
.........
Absolute
number
Percent
Rank
order
Absolute
number
Percent
Rank
order
5
54
13
6
5.2
55.6
13.4
6.2
6
1
2
5
101
686
366
186
5.4
37.6
20.0
10.2
6
1
2
5
10
9
10.3
9.3
3
4
226
257
12.4
14.4
4
3
97
100.0
1822
100.0
203
medicine and mathematics ... ; considerable progress was shown in botany, zoology, and chemistry; least in geology and paleontology."
To be sure, the Darmstadter data cannot be used to confirm the trends
obtained from the analysis of the Philosophical Transactions, since they
include too few cases for trend-analysis. But the finding of the same rankorder in the two sets of material suggests that the trend data may also
be sound.
We have noted that changing foci of scientific interest can be interpreted
as the result of developments internal to the various sciences. But it would
be misleading to assume that this is entirely so. As Rickert and Max Weber
forcefully indicated through the concept of W ertbeziehung, scientists often
choose problems for investigation that are vitally linked with major values
and interests of the time. 24 Much of this study will examine some of the
extra-scientific elements which significantly influenced, if they did not
wholly determine, the foci of scientific interest.
24. See the profound discussion of the use of this concept in Alexander von
Schelting, Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre (Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1934), esp.
pp. 235 ff.
Interactions of
Science and
Military
Technique
1935
205
for the production of guns and advanced the empirical laws of firing.
Galileo, in his Dialoghi, suggested that (ignoring air resistance) the trajectory of a projectile described a parabola; while Torricelli concerned himself in great detail with the problems of the trajectory, range, and fire zone
of projectiles. Leibniz, as is evidenced by his posthumous writings, was
greatly concerned with such aspects of military problems as "military
medicine," "military mathematics," and "military mechanics." He also
worked on a "new air-pressure gun," as did Otto von Guericke and Denis
Papin. Isaac Newton, in his Principia (bk. 2, sect. 1-4) attempted to calculate the effect of air resistance upon the trajectory of a projectile. Johannes Bernoulli, who also studied the expansion of gunpowder gases,
pointed out Newton's error, with the result that it (bk. 2, prop. 37) was
eliminated in the second edition of the Principia. Euler continued the
theory that the parabola best approximates the actual trajectory of a
projectile; a subject dealt with minutely by Maupertuis.
But all this simply indicates that outstanding scientists have at times
been directly and perhaps tenuously concerned with matters of military
technique. In order to see the ways in which such practical exigencies
stimulated research in certain fields of "pure" science, it is necessary to
make a detailed study of another sort.
The technical and scientific problems set by the development of artillery
in the seventeenth century were these. Interior ballistics is concerned with
the formation, temperature, and volume of the gases into which the powder charge is converted by combustion, and the work performed by the
expansion of these gases upon the gun, carriage, and projectile. Formulae
for the velocity imparted to a projectile by the gases of given weights of
gunpowder and for their reaction upon the gun and carriage must be computed to determine the correct relation of the weight of charge to the
projectile's weight and length of bore, the velocity of recoil, and the like.
Not only were such nineteenth-century scientists as Gay-Lussac, Chevreul, Graham, Piobert, Cavalli, Mayevski, Otto, Neumann, Noble, and
Abel concerned with these problems, but also many investigators before
them. Of obvious fundamental importance for interior ballistics is the
relation between pressure and volume of gases. That the volume of any
gas varies inversely as its pressure was stated by Boyle in 1662 and verified
independently by Mariotte some fourteen years later. Apparently Boyle
was not unaware of the relation between his discovery and problems of
interior ballistics, for he proposed to the Royal Society "that it might be
examined what is really the expansion of gunpowder, when fired." 2 This
same problem was investigated in detail by Leeuwenhoek, who, although
2. Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, 4 vols. (London,
1756), 1:455.
206
he resided in Holland, may be considered in the stream of "English science," by virtue of the 375 papers that he sent to the Royal Society, of
which he was a member. His experiments in interior ballistics, published
in the Transactions, aroused sufficient interest to be repeated before the
society by Papin.
At one of the early meetings of the society, both Boyle and Lord
Brouncker, the latter being especially interested in ballistics, suggested
experiments on air pressure and the expansion of gases. One of the proposed experiments dealt with the inflammation and combustion of a charge
of powder-a problem basic to the noted memoirs in interior ballistics
centuries later by Noble and Abel, read before the Royal Society in 1874
and 1879, respectively.
At one of the earliest meetings of the society "the lord viscount Brouncker
was desired to prosecute the experiment of the recoiling of guns, and to
bring it in at the next meeting." 3 These experiments were repeated and
followed with great interest by the other members of the society.
Exterior ballistics is concerned with the motion of a projectile after it
leaves the gun: it treats of the trajectory and the relation between the
velocity of a projectile and the resistance of the air. The most notable
experiments in exterior ballistics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
were those by Robins, Hutton, Didion, Poisson, Helie, Bashforth, Mayevski, and Siacci, but these were largely based upon scientific work of the
preceding period.
As is well known, Galileo introduced his Discorsi, in which he dealt
with the trajectory of a projectile, with an acknowledgment of the assistance rendered him by the Florentine arsenal. Moreover, as Whewell
noted, the practical military applications of the doctrine of projectiles
doubtlessly helped to establish the truth of Galileo's views.
The study of the free fall of bodies-so essential to exterior ballistics
in its initial stages-was continued by Robert Hooke in his experiments
with the fall of "steel" bullets. He followed this investigation with some
experiments designed to determine the resistance of air to projectiles. This
resistance, he maintained, could be tested by "shooting horizontally from
the top of some high tree." Hooke went further and constructed an engine
"for determining the force of gunpowder by weight"-an experiment that
proved of sufficient interest to be repeated at two subsequent meetings of
the society.
Christopher Wren, concerned with the invention of "offensive and defensive engines," was, with Wallis and Huygens, the first to state correctly
the motion of bodies in their direct impact. This law, together with the first
two laws of motion, affords a basis for an approximation to the trajectory
3. Ibid., 1:8.
207
208
209
often proceeds along lines largely independent of social forces once the
initial problems have become evident, and in this way, much research may
be related only in tenuous degree to military or economic developments.
Thus science develops an autonomous corpus of investigation which has
its origin in strictly scientific, not utilitarian, considerations. It is these
developments (which probably constitute the greater part of science) arising from the relative autonomy of scientific work that seem to have little
or no connection with social forces.
10
The Neglect
of the
Sociology
of Science
1952
Although the interaction between science and society has been a subject
of occas,ional interest to scholars for more than a century, there has been
little effort to provide a systematic organization of the facts and ideas
which comprise that subject-the sociology of science. Numerous works,
particularly in recent years, have variously dealt with one or another part
of the subject-for example, the writings of Bernal, Crowther, and Farrington, of Lilley, Pledge, and Hogben. But these, with the important
exception of Lilley's "Social Aspects of the History of Science," 1 have not
examined the linkage between science and social structure by means of a
conceptual framework that has proved effective in other branches of sociology. It is the special distinction of this book that it puts into provisional
order an accumulation of otherwise fragmentary and uncoordinated materials on the interplay of science and society.
When a book is clearly and closely organized, it becomes redundant to
sketch out its design in a foreword. That is certainly the case with Mr.
Barber's book. There is no need to enumerate its major themes here, for
he does that himself, lucidly and succinctly. But there may be some value
in attempting to place his book, and what it represents, in its social setting,
to consider why it is that we have had to wait so long for a book which
essays the task Mr. Barber has set himself: "to get a better understanding
of science by applying to it the kind of sociological analysis that has proved
fruitful when directed to many other kinds of social activities." How does
it happen that the sociology of science is still a largely unfulfilled promise
Originally published as foreword to Bernard Barber, Science and the Social Order
(New York: The Free Press, 1952), pp. xi-xxiii; reprinted with permission.
1. See Archives lnternationales d'Histoire des Sciences 28 (1949): 376-443.
211
212
213
Not having that direct bearing on a body of theory which makes for
cumulative knowledge, the empirical studies that have been made, from
time to time, by natural scientists have resulted in a thin scattering of
unconnected findings rather than a chain of closely linked findings.
As a consequence of all this, the sociology of science has long been in a
disordered condition: on the one hand, it is unduly speculative, with few
established facts altogether and, on the other, it suffers from an excess of
empiricism, since these facts are ordinarily not cast in the mold of theory.
Largely absent in this field are the productive patterns of inquiry in
which, as has been said, men pursue facts until they uncover ideas or
pursue ideas until they uncover facts.
It is by no means inherent in the subject matter that the years and
decades should have slipped by with relatively few accretions to our knowledge of the interconnections of science and society. Rather, this is the
natural outcome of continued neglect. Since the social scientists having the
needed grounding in theory have not ordinarily taken up empirical studies
in the sociology of science and since the physical and biological scientists
who have conducted such studies ordinarily lack the needed theory, it is no
wonder that the growth of the field has been stunted. Not that mere numbers of students devoted to a special branch of knowledge ensure its rapid
growth-some problems remain refractory to quick solution-but the converse is a truism: a field of knowledge does not prosper if it is neglected.
The slow, uncertain, and sporadic development of the sociology of
science has meant that its leading ideas have grown worn with repetition.
As one example among many of this, consider the history of the inferences
that have been drawn from the multiple and independent appearance of
the same scientific discovery, or of the same invention. It may not be too
much to say that the implications about the cultural context of innovation
which have been drawn from this strategic fact are among the more
significant conceptions found in the sociology of science. These conceptions
are, properly enough, associated with the sociologists, William F. Ogburn
and Dorothy S. Thomas, who drew up a list of almost 150 independently
duplicated scientific discoveries and technological inventions, pointing out
that these innovations became virtually inevitable as certain types of knowledge accumulated in the cultural heritage and as social needs directed
attention to particular problems.
In two respects, the history of this idea illustrates the slow pace of
development in the sociology of science: first, this idea has been little
elaborated or extended since it was emphasized by Ogburn and Thomas a
generation ago and second, essentially the same idea regarding the sociological significance of multiple independent discoveries had been repeatedly
formulated, particularly throughout the century before. As early as 1828,
Macaulay, in his essay on Dryden, had noted that the independent inven-
214
215
study, the extent to which, as the hypothesis supposes, the same constituents were indeed comparably developed in the different cultures where
the same discovery or invention appeared. Consequently, this hypothesis,
like other hypotheses in the sociology of science, has remained substantially unextended for more than a century. 2
It is no easy matter to say why it is that the sociology of science has for
so long remained in a state of comparative lethargy. This condition is
particularly anomalous, since it seems widely agreed that science constitutes
one of the major dynamic forces in modern society. Possibly there are
social and institutional circumstances which, largely unnoticed, combine to
divert the attention of scholars and scientists from a subject which one
would expect to be of central interest in a world where science looms large.
The relative neglect of this subject by physical and biological scientists
perhaps requires little explanation. After all, specialization in science calls
for devoted concentration of effort, and the sociology of science is not
their metier. Hard at work on research in their own science, they are
scarcely in a position to take up yet another life as sociologists. Furthermore, current practices and assumptions in the world of natural science
may militate against their developing even a casual interest in the linkages
of science and social structure. For example, there may prevail, among
these scientists, the assumption that the history of science is comprised by
a succession of great minds-an assumption with an easy plausibility since
turning points in the history of science are indeed commonly associated
with great scientists. Standing on such an assumption, scientists may readily
lose sight of the less visible social processes which play their indispensable
part. In paying its homage to these great minds, society may inadvertently
reinforce that assumption. Eponymy, the practice of affixing a scientist's
name to his discovery, as with Boyle's law or Planck's constant; Nobel
prizes and lesser testimonials; nationalistic claims to scientific preeminence
which lead to a focus on the contributions of one's own nationals; the
virtual anonymity of the lesser breed of scientists whose work may be indispensable for the accumulation of scientific knowledge-these and similar
circumstances may all reinforce an emphasis on the great men of science
and a neglect of the social and cultural contexts which have significantly
aided or hindered their achievements.
Physical and biological scientists may be reluctant to consider the
bearing of social environment upon science for quite another set of reasons.
They may be apprehensive that the dignity or integrity of their work
might be damaged were they to recognize the implications of the fact that,
as Mr. Barber points out, science is an organized social activity, that it
2. See chapters 14-17 in this volume, which treat multiple independent discoveries
as data strategic for investigating the character of the reward system in science.
216
presupposes support by society, that the measure of this support and the
types of scientific work for which it is given differ in different social structures, and that the directions of scientific advance may be appreciably
affected by all this. Or perhaps their reluctance comes from the widespread
and mistaken belief that to trace such connections between science and
society is to impugn the motives of scientists. But, as Mr. Barber and
others have shown, this belief involves a confusion between the motives
of scientists and the social environment which affects the course of science.
It assumes also that scientists are consistently aware of the social influences
which affect their behavior, and this is by no means a self-evident truth.
To consider how and how far various social structures canalize the directions of scientific research is not to arraign scientists for their motives.
Nor, as Mr. Barber reminds us by emphasizing the relative autonomy of
science, is it to make the institution of science the mere appendage of
political, economic, and other social institutions.
Whether these are, or are not, the reasons why physical and biological
scientists neglect the sociology of science, they can scarcely be the reasons
why sociologists have given this field such little attention. The mythopoeic view of history has had little standing among them for generationsif anything, they are more likely to underestimate the distinctive role of
great men in social change. Nor do sociologists generally assume that to
study the social patterning of human behavior is to condemn the motives
of those acting out those patterns-they are more likely to adopt the
relativistic opinion that to understand is to excuse, that the conception of
individual responsibility is alien to social determinism. It would seem,
therefore, that the absence of concerted research interest in this field
among sociologists must have another explanation.
Although there is little evidence on which to base an explanation, the
fact itself is at once so conspicuous, and strange, that it invites conjecture.
It may be that the connections between science and society constitute a
subject matter which has become tarnished for academic sociologists who
know that it is close to the heart of Marxist sociology. Such an attitude
need not stem from a fear of guilt by association with politically condemned ideas, though this, too, may play a part. 3 Like attitudes toward
most revolutionary ideas, attitudes toward Marxism have long been polarized: they have typically called for total acceptance or for total rejection.
Sociologists who have come to reject the Marxist conceptions out of hand
have not uncommonly rejected also the subject matters to which they
pertained: American sociologists do not much study the conflicts between
social classes just as they do not much study the relations between science
3. Written in 1952, this interpretation evidently alludes to the fears rampant in
academic circles during the McCarthy period. Cf. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Wagner
Thielens, Jr., The Academic Mind (New York: Free Press, 1958).
217
and society. At the other pole, those who regard themselves as disciples of
Marxist theory seem to act as disciples merely, content to reiterate what
the masters have said or to illustrate old conclusions with newly selected
examples, rather than to consider these conclusions as hypotheses which
they are to test, extend, or otherwise modify through actual empirical
inquiry. At both polar extremes, the sociology of science suffers, either by
inattention or by preconception.
In part, also, the field is the victim of existing programs of higher education. Physical and biological scientists have typically had their rigorous
training confined to the specialized skills and knowledge of their field, and
few have had more than a slight acquaintance with social science. Social
scientists, similarly, have typically had little training in one or another
branch of the more exact sciences or even in the history of science, and
consequently feel reluctant to take up a specialization for which they see
themselves as unprepared. In the meantime, the sociology of science falls
unnoticed between these two academic stools.
Yet to emphasize the relative neglect of this field is not to say that it is
wholly barren or condemned to slow growth. Mr. Barber's book would
belie any such rash claim. Actually, there are many signs that this condition of neglect is drawing to an end and that the prospects for growth
are greater than ever before.
Various social tendencies, not entirely new but now more conspicuous
and compelling, are forcing attention to the relations between science and
its environing social structure. The politicalizing of science in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia, for instance, has aroused the interest of many
in identifying the particular kinds of social contexts in which science
thrives, a problem central to the sociology of science and one which Mr.
Barber treats more systematically than has been done before. In liberal
societies as well, recent changes have subjected scientists to abrupt conflicts
between their several social roles and between their deep-seated values.
Early in their apprenticeship, scientists have commonly acquired certain
values which, as a result of changed social conditions, they are asked to
unlearn and abandon at a later point in their career. The value, for
example, which calls for making new-won knowledge part of the commonwealth of science now clashes with the demands made upon them, in their
role as citizens, to keep some of this knowledge secret. Men previously
unaware of the social contexts of their attitudes and values are apt to
become acutely aware of them when they are frustrated in their aims by
strains and stresses which are manifestly social in origin. Even the most
artless and singleminded of scientists, living out their work-lives within the
confines of the laboratory, must now know, to adapt a remark by Butterfield, that they are "not autonomous god-like creatures acting in a world
of unconditioned freedom."
218
219
220
and "values" of scientists. But this literature is concerned with what the
social scientists would call ideal patterns, that is, with ways in which
scientists ought to think, feel, and act. It does not necessarily describe, in
needed detail, the ways in which scientists actually do think, feel, and act.
Of these actual patterns, there has been little systematic study-the
psychological examination of biologists and physicists by Roe representing
a rare exception. It is at least possible that if social scientists were to begin
observations in the laboratories and field stations of physical and biological
scientists; more might be learned, in a comparatively few years, about the
psychology and sociology of science than in all the years that have gone
before.
From all this, it seems that this book could scarcely have appeared at a
more fitting time. For at a time of renewed interest in a field, even a single
book, which provides a tentative systematic overview of that field, can
have a disproportionately great effect. It is not unlikely that Mr. Barber's
book, together with others that will probably follow in its path, will do
much to encourage the establishment of university courses introducing
students to the sociology of science. It may well be that some of the
students electing these courses, perhaps because the recent course of
history has aroused their curiosity about the social environment of science,
will develop an abiding interest in the subject. These would then be the
new and substantially the first generation of recruits, trained both in social
science and in one or another of the physical and biological sciences, who,
as they mature into independent scholars, could establish the sociology of
science as a specialized field of disciplined knowledge. Mr. Barber's book
takes a long step in that direction.
The
Normative
Structure of
Science
Part
Prefatory Note
The papers making up part 3
constitute the core of Merton's
work on the ethos of science"the emotionally toned complex of
rules, prescriptions, mores, beliefs,
values and presuppositions that
are held to be binding upon the
scientist." They are concerned explicitly with science as a social
institution rather than as a type of
knowledge, and the fact that his
writings on this topic have appeared
periodically since the 1930s, just
as have his writings in the
sociology of knowledge, attests
his continuing active engagement
in both levels of analysis.
The papers illustrate the transition from treating science as a
"strategic research site" for the
sociology of knowledge to treating
it as a subject worth investigation
in its own right. The path of
logical development in these successive papers in clear: from the
societal values that encouraged
science, through the concept of an
ethos that makes science a viable
institution distinct from (and
sometimes pitted against) other
parts of society, to an analysis
of the component institutional
imperatives that make up the core
of the ethos. The importance of
these papers to the development
of the sociology of science can
hardly be overestimated.
The first paper provides the
qualitative foundation for Merton's
argument that the growth of science
224
Prefatory Nate
225
shift in interest from values to norms, or from how people define the
world and their role in it to the rules by which they organize their interactions in playing out this larger role.
In laying out the general character of the ethos of science, however,
Merton does not yet specify the central norms and their interrelationships.
But the potential is obviously there. He mentions, for instance, "the sentiments embodied in the ethos of science-characterized by such terms as
intellectual honesty, integrity, organized scepticism, disinterestedness, impersonality." The idea of universalism is implicit in much of his discussion
of the problems raised by the imposition of irrelevant criteria for evaluating
scientific knowledge (as in the Nazi claim that only Aryans can do valid
science). His treatment of organized scepticism, however, reminds one
more of Barber's later definition of rationality as a norm of science ("the
critical approach to all the phenomena of human existence in the attempt
to reduce them to ever more consistent, orderly, and generalized forms of
understanding") than of his own subsequent definition ( 1942) of organized scepticism as emphasizing primarily an institutionally enjoined critical
attitude toward the work of fellow scientists.
Still, one sees here the emerging outlines of a more concise depiction of
the ethos of science. In addition Merton makes ingenious use of a concept
employed in the first paper to aid his analysis of what we would today ca11
societal "backlash" against science. In explaining how it was that religion
could both encourage science and also find itself threatened by science, he
invokes the distinction between a religious ethos and an explicit theology
and points out that as long as action reflects "proper" motivations (that is,
so long as it is congruent with the religious ethos), there is little concern
for its concrete historical consequences until after they have appeared. In
the same way, he suggests that scientists have often acted in accord with
the motivations encouraged by their ethos but have failed to consider
the impact that the outcome of their actions will have upon society. The
lesson that had only been implied in Merton's earlier paper, "The
Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action," is now made
explicit: the institutional imperatives of science must be construed within
their wider social context if scientists are to avoid unanticipated (and
unwanted) consequences of their behavior. Premonitory antipositivistic
passages such as' this one, drawn from a paper written in 1938, take on
added interest in the light of current worldwide attacks mounted against
science and scientists:
Stress upon the purity of science has had other consequences that threaten
rather than preserve the social esteem of science. It is repeatedly urged that
scientists should in their research ignore all considerations other than the
advance of knowledge. Attention is to be focused exclusively on the scientific
significance of their work with no concern for the practical uses to which it
226
may be put or for its social repercussions generally. . . . The objective consequences of this attitude have furnished a further basis of revolt against science;
an incipient revolt that is found in virtually every society where science has
reached a high stage of development. Since the scientist does not or can not
control the direction in which his discoveries are applied, he becomes the
subject of reproach and of more violent reactions insofar as these applications
are disapproved. . . . The antipathy toward the technological products is
projected toward science itself. Thus, when newly discovered gases or explosives are applied as military instruments, chemistry as a whole is censured by
those whose humanitarian sentiments are outraged. Science is held largely
responsible for endowing those engines of human destruction which, it is said,
may plunge our civilization into everlasting night and confusion.
The third paper, perhaps the least "complete" (in the traditional Aristotelian sense of being a well-rounded essay) of all Merton's papers in this
volume, is yet one of the most significant in the history of the sociology
of science. It was originally written at the request of Georges Gurvitch,
then a refugee from Nazi-occupied France, for the first issue of his ill-fated
Journal of Legal and Political Sociology, which expired soon after it was
born. To fit the theme of that first issue of the Journal, the paper was
saddled with the rather misleading title, "A Note on Science and Democracy." While it provided an opportune occasion for Merton to formulate a
concise outline of the normative structure of science, the necessarily brief
paper did not cover the subject in depth. Possibly as a result of this, the
paper has provided a convenient target for critics of the Mertonian
paradigm despite the fact that his other writings show that much of this
criticism is misplaced.
The paper is essentially a definition of the four major norms, or institutional imperatives, that comprise the ethos of science and a statement
of their interdependence as well as their functional relationships to the
formal goal of scientific work: "the extension of certified knowledge."
Merton gives less emphasis here than in the 1938 paper to the nonlogical
aspects of the ethos, and less reference to the historical origins and transmutations of these norms. In a footnote in the earlier paper, for instance,
Merton writes: "Some phases of this complex [of rules, etc.] may be
methodologically desirable, but observance of the rules is not dictated
solely by methodological considerations"; while in this paper he states
more bluntly, "The institutional imperatives (mores) derive from the goal
and the methods. . . . [They] possess a methodologic rationale but they
are binding, not only because they are procedurally efficient, but because
they are believed right and good." The difference between the two formulations is slight, but apparently significant, with the latter seeming to imply
(despite Merton's explicit rejection of this view in his theoretical work
in functional analysis) that functional needs somehow create the structures
necessary to implement them.
Prefatory Note
227
Later work in the sociology of science3 has indicated how the four norms
are functional with respect to the goal of science, but perhaps there would
have been less occasion for controversy if Merton had drawn out the
striking parallels between these norms and components of the seventeenthcentury Protestant ethic. The norm of disinterestedness, for example, could
have been reinforced by its similarity to the idea of stewardship, or "the
calling"; the evangelical implications of the desire to glorify God through
uncovering and publicizing the plan of His works could certainly have
legitimated the scientific norm of communism. Particularly in the Calvinist
stress on the equality of souls before the Almighty, there is strong support
for the norm of universalism, and one might even suppose that organized
scepticism could have received substantial impetus from the mutual suspicion that existed among those who could never be sure which of their
family and friends were "saved" and which "damned."
Despite its brevity, the paper also contains strong hints of at least two
items which were to come much later from Merton's typewriter. In the
footnote discussing the origins of Newton's aphorism, "If I have seen
farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," is to be found the
first indication of an abiding interest that would result finally in the book
On the Shoulders of Giants ( 1965). And in Merton's brief reference to
the importance of eponymy and to "institutional emphasis upon recognition and esteem as the sole property right of the scientist in his discoveries," as well as to controversies over priority, he comes tantalizingly
close to identifying the principal components in the reward system of
science. We cannot now guess what the immediate history of the sociology
of science might have been had the Mertonian paradigm been established
in 1942 instead of 1957, but this near-miss only goes to underline the
critical importance of the paper.
N.W.S.
3. Recent work utilizing Merton's analysis of the social norms of science includes:
Warren 0. Hagstrom, The Scientific Community (New York: Basic Books, 1965);
Norman W. Storer, The Social System of Science (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1966); Norman W. Storer and Talcott Parsons, "The Disciplines as a
Differentiating Force," in Edward B. Montgomery, ed., The Foundations of Access
to Knowledge (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1968), pp. 101-21; Andre
F. Cournand and Harriet Zuckerman, "The Code of Science," Studium Generate
23 (October 1970): 942-61; Stephen Cotgrove and Steven Box, Science, Industry
and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Science (London: George Allen and Unwin,
Ltd., 1970), chapter 2; Maurice N. Richter, Jr., Science -as a Cultural Process
(Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1972), chapter 6; Marian Blissett, Politics
in Science (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), chapter 3; Seymour Martin Lipset and
Richard R. Dobson, "The Intellectual as Critic and Rebel: With Special Reference
to the United States and the Soviet Union," Daedalus 101 (Summer 1972): 137-98,
esp. 159 ff.; Seymour Martin Lipset, "Academia and Politics in America," in T. J.
Nossiter, ed., Imagination and Precision in the Social Sciences (London: Faber,
1972), pp. 211-89.
11
The Puritan
Spur to
Science
1938
229
certain degree of selection is therefore necessary for the purpose of abstracting those elements which had such a perceivable relation.
Puritanism attests to the theorem that nonlogical notions with a transcendental reference may nevertheless exercise a considerable influence upon
practical behavior. If the fancies of an inscrutable deity do not lend themselves to scientific investigation, human action predicated upon a particular
conception of this deity does. It was precisely Puritanism which built a
new bridge between the transcendental and human action, thus supplying
a motive force for the new science. To be sure, Puritan doctrines rested
ultimately upon an esoteric theqlogical base but these were translated into
the familiar and cogent language of the laity.
Puritan principles undoubtedly represent to some extent an accommodation to the current scientific and intellectual advance. Puritans had to
find some meaningful place for these activities within their view of life.
But to dismiss the relationship between Puritanism and science with this
formula would be superficial. Clearly, the psychological implications of the
Puritan system of values independently conduced to an espousal of science,
and we would grossly simplify the facts to accord with a pre-established
thesis if we failed to note the convergence of these two movements. Moreover, the changing class structure of the time reinforced the Puritan
sentiments favoring science since a large proportion of Puritans came from
the rising class of bourgeoisie, of merchants. 1 They manifested their
increasing power in at least three ways. First, in their positive regard for
both science and technology which reflected and promised to enhance this
power. Second was their increasingly fervent belief in progress, a profession
of faith that stemmed from their growing social and economic importance.
A third manifestation was their hostility toward the existing class structure
which limited and hampered their participation in political control, an
antagonism which found its climax in the Revolution.
Yet we cannot readily assume that the bourgeoisie were Puritans solely
because the Puritan ethic appealed to bourgeois sentiments. The converse
was perhaps even more important, as Weber has shown. Puritan sentiments
and beliefs prompting rational, tireless industry were such as to aid economic success. The same considerations apply equally to the close connection between Puritanism and science: the religious movement partly
"adapted" itself to the growing prestige of science but it initially involved
deep-seated sentiments which inspired its followers to a profound and
consistent interest in the pursuit of science.
1. Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, 2 vols.
(New York: Macmillan, 1931), 2:681; Roland Usher, The Reconstruction of the
English Church, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1910), especially vol. 2, which
contains a statistical study of the social origins of Puritan ministers.
230
The Puritan doctrines were nothing if not lucid. If they provided motivation for the contemporary scientists, this should be evident from their
words and deeds. Not that scientists, any more than other mortals, are
necessarily aware of the sentiments which invest with meaning their way
of life. Nonetheless, the observer may often, though not readily, uncover
these tacit valuations and bring them to light. Such a procedure should
enable us to determine whether the putative consequences of the Puritan
ethic truly proved effective. Moreover, it will disclose the extent to which
all this was perceived by the persons whom it most concerned. Accordingly,
we shall examine the works of the natural philosopher who "undoubtedly
did more than any one of his time to make Science a part of the intellectual
equipment of educated men," Robert Boyle. 2 His investigations in physics,
chemistry, and physiology, to mention only the chief fields of achievement
of this omnifarious experimentalist, were epochal. Add to this the fact that
he was one of the individuals who attempted explicitly to establish the
place of science in the scale of cultural values and his importance for our
particular problem becomes manifest. But Boyle was not alone. Equally
significant for our purpose were John Ray, whom Haller termed, a bit
effusively, the greatest botanist in the history of man; Francis Willughby,
who was perhaps as eminent in zoology as was Ray in botany; John
Wilkins, one of the leading spirits in the "invisible college" which developed into the Royal Society; Oughtred, Barrow, Grew, Wallis, Newton;
but a complete list would comprise a Scientific Register of the time.
Further materials for our purpose are provided by the Royal Society which,
instituted just after the middle of the century, stimulated scientific advance.
In this instance we are fortunate to have a contemporary account, written
under the constant supervision of the members of the Society in order that
it might be representative of the motives and aims of that group. This is
Thomas Sprat's wid6ly read History of the Royal-Society of London, published in 1667, after it had been examined by Wilkins and other representatives of the Society. 3 From these works, then, and from the writings
of other scientists of the period, we may glean the chief motive forces of
the new science.
2. J. F. Fulton, "Robert Boyle and His Influence on Thought in the Seventeenth
Century," Isis 18 (1932): 77-102. The range of Boyle's prolific writings is shown
in Professor Fulton's exemplary bibliography.
3. Cf. Charles L. Sonnichsen, "The Life and Works of Thomas Sprat" (doctoral
dissertation, Harvard University, 1931), p. 131 ff., where substantial evidence of
the fact that the History of the Royal-Society was representative of the views of the
Society is presented. As we shall see, the statements in Sprat's book concerning the
aims of the Society bear distinct similarity on every score to Boyle's characterizations
of the motives and aims of scientists in general. See ibid., p. 167. This similarity is
evidence of the dominance of the ethos which included these attitudes.
231
World, and the more conspicuous Stars, two of God's principal ends were, the
Manifestation of His own Glory, and the Good of Men.4
It will not be perhaps difficult for you [Pyrophilus]: to discern, that those who
labour to deter men from sedulous Enquiries into Nature, do (though I grant,
designlessly) take a Course which tends to defeat God of both those mention'd
Ends. 5
232
This is the motif that recurs in constant measure in the very writings
which often contain considerable scientific contributions: these worldly
activities and scientific achievements manifest the Glory of God and
enhance the Good of Man. The juxtaposition of the spiritual and the
material is characteristic and significant. This culture rested securely on
a substratum of utilitarian norms which identified the useful and the true.
Puritanism itself had imputed a threefold utility to science. Natural philosophy was instrumental first, in establishing practical proofs of the scientist's state of grace; second, in enlarging control of nature; and third, in
glorifying God. Science was enlisted in the service of individual, society,
and deity. That these were adequate grounds could not be denied. They
comprised not merely a claim to legitimacy, they afforded incentives which
cannot be readily overestimated. One need only look through the personal
correspondence of seventeenth-century scientists to realize this.6
John Wilkins proclaimed the experimental study of Nature to be a most
effective means of begetting in men a veneration for God. 7 Francis
Willughby, probably the most eminent zoologist of the time, was prevailed
upon to publish his works-which his excessive modesty led him to deem
unworthy of publication-only when Ray insisted that it was a means of
in the latter part of the century. See Arthur E. Shipley, "The Revival of Science in
the Seventeenth Century," in Vanuxem Lectures (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1914); F. Greenslet, Joseph Glanvill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1900), p. 78. The second source of opposition was literary. For example,
Shadwell, in his comedy "The Virtuoso" (1676), and Butler, in his "Elephant in the
Moon" and "Hudibras," ridiculed the pursuits of certain "scientists," but these
literary satires were criticism of exaggerated scientism and diletiantism rather than
the significant scientific works of the day. Cf. The Record of the Royal Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), pp. 45 ff. A third source of opposition,
and by far the most important, was found among those churchmen who felt that the
theological foundations of their beliefs were being undermined by scientific investigations. But theology and religion must not be confused. Orthodox, dogmatic
theologians then, as ever, opposed any activity which might lead to the contravention
of their dogmas. But the implications of religion, particularly of the religious ethic,
were quite contrariwise. It is this ethic, following with equal ineluctability from
diverse theological bases, which in its consequences was of far greater social significance than the abstruse doctrines which rarely penetrated to the life of the people.
Professor R. F. Jones suggests a fourth source. After the restoration, ardent royalists
impugned science, and particularly the Royal Society, because of the close connection
between these, Baconianism, and Puritanism. This suggests that contemporaries
recognized the strong Puritan espousal of the new experimental science, as indeed
they did. See Jones's excellent study, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Background of the Battle of the Books (St. Louis: Washington University Studies, 1936),
pp. 191-92, 224.
6. See, for example, the letters of William Oughtred in Correspondence of Scientific Men of the Seventeenth Century, ed. S. J. Rigaud, pp. xxxiv, and passim. Or see
the letters of John Ray in the Correspondence of John Ray, ed. Edwin Lankester
(London, 1848), pp. 389, 395, 402, and passim.
7. Principles and Duties of Natural Religion, 6th ed. (London, 1710), pp. 236 ff.
233
glorifying God. 8 And Ray's panegyric of those who honor Him by studying
His works was so well received that five large editions were issued in some
twenty years. 9
Many emancipated souls of the present day, accustomed to a radical
cleavage between religion and science and convinced of the relative social
unimportance of religion for the modern Western world, are apt to generalize this state of affairs. To them, these recurrent pious phrases signify
Machiavellian tactics or calculating hypocrisy or at best merely customary
usage, but nothing of deep-rooted motivating convictions. The evidence
of extreme piety invites the charge that qui nimium probat nihil probat.
But such an interpretation is possible only upon the basis of an unwarranted extrapolation of twentieth-century beliefs and attitudes to
seventeenth-century society. Though it always serves to inflate the ego of
the iconoclast and sometimes to extol the social images of his own day,
"debunking" can supplant truth with error. As a case in point, it is difficult
to believe that Boyle, who manifested his piety by expending considerable
sums to have the Bible translated into foreign tongues as well as in less
material ways, was simply rendering lip service to Protestant beliefs. As
Professor G. N. Clark properly notes in this connection:
There is . . . always a difficulty in estimating the degree to which what we
call religion enters into anything which was said in the seventeenth century
in religious language. It is not solved by discounting all theological terms and
treating them merely as common form. On the contrary, it is more often
necessary to remind ourselves that these words were then seldom used without
their accompaniment of meaning, and that their use did generally imply a
heightened intensity of feeling. This sense of the closeness of God and the
Devil to every act and fact of daily life is an integral part of the character of
the century. 10
In various ways, then, general religious ideas were translated into concrete policy. This was no mere intellectual exercise. Puritanism transfused
ascetic vigor into activities which, in their own right, could not as yet
achieve self-sufficiency. It so redefined the relations between the divine
and the mundane as to move science to the front rank of social values. As
it happened, this was at the immediate expense of literary, and ultimately,
8. See Edwin Lankester, ed., Memorials of John Ray (London, 1846), p. 14n.
9. John Ray, Wisdom of God (London: 1691 ), pp. 126-29, and passim. Striking
illustrations of the extent to which Ray had assimilated the Puritan sentiments are
to be found throughout his correspondence. For example, he writes in a letter to
James Petiver ( 4 April 1701) : "I am glad your business increases so as to require
more attendance, and take up more of your time, which cannot be better employed
than in the works of your proper callings. What time you have to spare you will
do well to spend, as you are doing, in the inquisition and contemplation of the
works of God and nature" (Correspondence of John Ray, p. 390).
10. The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: University Press, 1929), p. 323.
234
235
236
237
that are congenial to Puritan tastes. Above all, it embraces two highly
prized values: utilitarianism and empiricism. 28
In a sense this explicit coincidence between Puritan tenets . and the
eminently desirable qualities of science as a calling which was suggested
by the historian of the Royal Society is casuistry. No doubt it is partly an
express attempt to fit the scientist qua pious layman into the framework of
the prevailing moral and social values. Since both the constitutional position and the personal authority of the clergy were far more important then
than now, it probably constituted a bid for religious and social sanction.
Science, no less than literature and politics, was still, to some extent, subject to approval by the clergy. 29
But this is not the entire explanation. Present-day discussions of
"rationalization" and "derivations" have been wont to becloud certain
fundamental issues. It is true that the "reasons" adduced to justify one's
actions often do not account satisfactorily for this behavior. It is also an
acceptable hypothesis that ideologies seldom give rise to action and that
both the ideology and action are rather the product of common sentiments
and values upon which they in turn react. But these ideas cannot be
ignored for two reasons. They provide clues for detecting the basic values
that motivate conduct. Such signposts cannot be profitably neglected. Of
even greater importance is the role of ideas in directing action into
particular channels. It is the dominating system of ideas that determines
the choice between alternative modes of action which are equally compatible with the underlying sentiments. Without such guidance and
direction, nonlogical action would become, within the limits of the valuesystem, random. 30
In the seventeenth century, the frequent recourse of scientists to religious
vindication suggests first of all that religion was a sufficiently powerful
28. Sprat perspicaciously suggests that monastic ascetism induced by religious
scruples was partially responsible for the lack of empiricism of the Schoolmen:
"But what sorry kinds of Philosophy must they needs produce, when it was a part of
their religion, to separate themselves, as much as they could, from the converse of
mankind? when they were so farr from being able to discover the secrets of Nature,
that they scarce had opportunity, to behold enough of its common works" (ibid., p.
19).
29. H. H. Henson, Studies in English Religion in the Seventeenth Century (London: J. Murray, 1903), p. 29.
30. Operationally, there is often a thin, uncertain line between "derivations" and
"residues" (Pareto). Constant elements in the speech reactions associated with action
manifest deep-rooted, effective sentiments. Speaking elliptically, these constant elements may be held to provide motivations for behavior, whereas the variable
elements are simply post factum justifications. But, in practice, it is at times exceedingly difficult to discriminate between the two. Once aware of the strong emotional
charge which certain religious convictions carried at the time, we may find it justifiable to treat these as residues rather than derivations.
238
239
240
It was a common practice for Puritans to couple their intense scorn for
a "jejeune Peripatetick Philosophy" with extravagant admiration for
"mechanicall knowledge," which substituted fact for fantasy. From every
direction, elements of the Puritan ethic converged to reinforce this set of
attitudes. Active experimentation embodied all the select virtues and precluded all the baneful vices. It represented a revolt against that Aristotelianism which was traditionally bound up with Catholicism; it supplanted
passive contemplation with active manipulation; it promised practical
utilities instead of sterile figments; it established in indubitable fashion the
glories of His creation. Small wonder that the Puritan transvaluation of
values carried with it the consistent endorsement of experimentalism.37
Empiricism and rationalism were canonized, beatified, so to speak. It
may~yery well be that the Puritan ethos did not directly influence the
method of science and that this was simply a parallel development in the
internal history of science, but it becomes evident that, through the psychological sanction of certain modes of thought and conduct, this complex of
attitudes made an empirically founded science commendable rather than,
as in the medieval period, reprehensible or at best acceptable on sufferance.
In short, Puritanism altered social orientations. It led to the setting up of
a new vocational hierarchy, based on criteria that bestowed prestige upon
the natural philosopher. As Professor Speier has well said, "There are
no activities which are honorable in themselves and are held excellent
in all social structures."38 And one of the consequences of Puritanism was
the reshaping of the social structure in such fashion as to bring esteem
to science. This must have influenced the direction of some talents into
scientific fields who, in other social contexts, would have turned to other
pursuits.
241
their previous condition. 39 This was not without its effects. Some, who
before might have turned to theology or rhetoric or philology, were
directed, through the subtle, largely unperceived and newly arisen predisposition of society, into scientific channels. Thus, Thomas Willis, whose
Cerebri Anatome was probably the most complete and accurate account of
the nervous system up to that time and whose name is immortalized in the
"circle of Willis," "was originally destined to theology, but in consequence
of the unfavorable conditions at that age for theological science, he turned
his attention to medicine." 40
No less indicative of a shift of interest is the lament of Isaac Barrow,
when he was professor of Greek at Cambridge: "I sit lonesome as an Attic
owl, who has been thrust out of the companionship of all other birds; while
classes in Natural Philosophy are full." 41 Evidently, Barrow's loneliness
proved too much for him, for, as is well known, in 1663 he left this chair
to accept the newly established Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics, in
which he was Newton's predecessor.
The science-loving amateur, so prominent a feature of the latter part of
the century, also reflects this new attitude. Nobles and wealthy commoners
turned to science not as a means of livelihood but as an object of devoted
interest. Partic~larly for them direct economic benefits were a negligible
consideration. Science afforded them the opportunity to devote their
energies to an honored task; an obligation as the comforts of unrelieved
idleness vanished from the new scale of values. 42
In the history of science the most famous of these amateurs is of course
Robert Boyle, but perhaps the best index of their importance is to be found
in their role in the formation of the :Royal Society.43 Of those who, in that
"wonderful pacifick year," 1660, constituted themselves into a definite
association, a considerable number-among them Lord Brouncker, Boyle,
Lord Bruce, Sir Robert Moray, Dr. Wilkins, Dr. Petty, and Abraham Hill
39. Cf. Sprat, History of the Royal-Society, p. 403.
40. Johann H. Baas, Outlines of the History of Medicine and the Medical Profession (New York, 1889).
.
41. Quoted by Hermann Hettner, Geschichte der englischen Literatur (Brunswick,
1894 ), pp. 16-17.
42. This is clearly brought out by William Derham's estimate of the virtuoso and
zoologist, Willughby. "He prosecuted his design with as great application as if he
had to get his bread thereby; all of which I mention . . . for an example to persons
of great estate and quality that they may be excited to answer the ends for which
God gives them estates, leisure, parts and gifts, or a good genius; which was not to
exercise themselves in vain or sinful follies, but to be employed for the glory and in
the service of the infinite Creator, and in doing good offices in the world" (Memorials
of John Ray, Consisting of His Life by Dr. Derham, ed. Edwin Lankester [London,
1846], pp. 34-35).
43. Martha Ornstein, The R6le of the Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 91 ff.
242
-were amateurs of this type. Hardly less assiduous were the efforts of
such virtuosi as Lord Willughby, John Evelyn, Samuel Hartlib, Francis
Potter, and William Molineux.
The social emphasis on science had a peculiarly fruitful effect, probably
because of the general state of scientific development. The methods and
objects of investigation were frequently not at many removes from daily
experience, and could be understood not only by the especially equipped
but by those with comparatively little technical education. 44 To be sure,
dilettantish interest in science seldom enriched its fruits directly, but it
served to establish it more firmly as a socially estimable pursuit. And this
same function was performed no less by Puritanism. The fact that science
today is almost wholly divorced from religious sanctions is itself of interest
as an example of the process of secularization. Having grown away from
its religious moorings, science has in turn become a dominant social value
to which other values are subordinated. Today it is much more common
in the Western world to subject the most diverse beliefs to the sanctions
presumably afforded by science than to those yielded by religion; the increasing reference to scientific authority in contemporary advertisements
and the long-standing eulogistic connotation of the very word "scientific"
diversely reflect the social standing of science.45
243
ethos. But the Puritan was not simply the last of the medievalists or the
first of the moderns. He was both. It was in the system of Puritan values,
as we have seen, that reason and experience began to be considered as
independent means for ascertaining even religious truth. Faith that is
unquestioning and not "rationally weighed,'' proclaimed Baxter, is not faith,
but a dream or fancy or opinion. In effect this grants to science a power
that may ultimately limit that of religion. This unhesitant assignment of a
virtual hegemony to science is based on the explicit a~sumption of the
unity of knowledge, experiential and supersensuous, so that the testimony
of science must perforce corroborate religious beliefs. 47
This conviction of the mutually confirmatory nature of reason and
revelation afforded a further basis for the favorable attitude toward experimental studies, which, it is assumed, will simply reinforce basic theological
dogmas. However, the active pursuit of science, thus freely sanctioned by
unsuspecting religionists created a new tone and habit of thought-to use
Lecky's phrase-that is the "supreme arbiter of the opinions of successive
periods." 48 As a consequence of this change, ecclesiastics, no longer able
to appeal to commonly accepted teachings of science which seem rather
to contravene various theological doctrines, are likely once again to
substitute authority for reason in an effort to emerge victorious from the
conflict.
In one direction, then, Puritanism led inevitably to the elimination of
religious restrictions on scientific work. This was the distinctly modern
element of Puritan beliefs. But this did not involve the relaxation of
religious discipline over conduct; quite the contrary. Compromise with the
then acceptable to scientists and religionists alike, of subserviency to ultimate religious goals and of autonomy within the scope of its investigations, that secularization became as explicit and pronounced as it had hitherto been implicit and subdued.
The Reformist tenets did not arise full-blown; they did not in their implications represent a radical break with the past, but, through a shift and intensification of emphasis,
helped effect a change which, though prepared by a long history of antecedent
tendencies, seemed saltatory. As Owst suggests, the Lollard teachings remind us
"of the honoured place which Work has continued to hold in Protestant faith and
practice. Its subsequent achievements, alike in science and industry, . . . when
'meritory works' are finally discountenanced, prove once again our kinship with the
past. The gulf of the Reformation is thus bridged once more and the spiritual continuity of our history maintained in the face of all such inevitable changes" (p. 557).
47. There is so admirable an accord and correspondency between the findings of
natural science and supernatural divinity, says Baxter, that the former "greatly advantageth us" in the belief of the latter. C. D., 1: 172-74. This illustrates the incipient
tendency of theology to become in a sense the handmaid of science since religious
concepts become dependent upon the type of universe which man can know. Cf.
Paul R. Anderson, Science in Defense of Liberal Religion (New York: Putnam,
1933), p. 191 ff.
48. William E. H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, 2 vols. (London, 1865), 1:7. See also A. C. McGriffert, The Rise of
Modern Religious Ideas, p. 18, and passim.
244
245
magisterial mood, Luther berates the Copernican theory: "Der Narr will
die ganze Kunst Astronomiae umkehren. Aber wie die heilige Schrift
anzeigt, so hiess Josua die Sonne still stehen, und nicht das Erdreich."51
Calvin also frowned upon the acceptance of numerous scientific discoveries
of his day, whereas the religious ethic which stemmed from him inspired
the pursuit of natural science. 52
This failure of the Reformers to foresee some of the most fundamental
social effects of their teachings was not simply the result of ignorance. It
was rather an outcome of that type of nonlogical thought which deals
primarily with the motives rather than the probable results of behavior.
Righteousness of motive is the basic concern; other considerations, including that of the probability of attaining the end, are precluded. Action
enjoined by a dominant set of values must be performed. But, with the
complex interaction of forces in society, the effects of action ramify. They
are not restricted to the specific sphere in which the values were originally
centered, occurring in interrelated fields ignored at the outset. Yet it is
precisely because these spheres of society are interrelated that the further
consequences in adjacent areas react upon the basic system of values. It
is this usually unlooked-for reaction which constitutes a most important
factor in the process of secularization, of the transformation or breakdown
of value-systems. This is the essential paradox of social action-the
"realization" of values may lead to their renunciation. We may thus para51. Quoted by Dorothy Stimson, The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican
Theory (New York, 1917), p. 39. As Dean Stimson suggests (p. 99), such denunciations were less influential than those of the Catholic clergy, largely because of the
Protestant doctrine of the right to individual interpretation. This was one effective
source of secularization.
52. In view of this analysis, it is surprising to note the statement credited to Max
Weber, that the opposition of the Protestant Reformers is sufficient reason for not
linking Protestantism with scientific advance. See Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Munich:
Duncker & Humblot, 1924), p. 314. This remark is especially unanticipated since it
does not at all accord with Weber's discussion of the same point in his other works.
Cf. Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Religionssoziologie (Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1922),
1:564, 141; Wissenschaft als Beruf (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1921), pp. 1920. The explanation may be that the first is not Weber's statement, since the Wirtschaftsgeschichte was compiled from scraps of Weber's notes by two of his students:
"a bundle of sheets of notes that were little more than catchwords, put down in a
handwriting hardly legible even to those familiar with it." It is unlikely that Weber
would have made the elementary error of confusing the opposition to scientific discoveries of the Reformers with the unforeseen consequences of the Protestant ethic,
particularly since he expressly warns against the failure of such discrimination in his
Religionssoziologie. Nor would he have been apt to identify the attitudes of the Reformers themselves with those of their followers as the Protestant movement devel
oped. See further the comment of Troeltsch (Social Teachings, 2:879-80), to the
effect that although Calvin was himself antagonistic to some scientific discoveries,
the consequence of his doctrine was to provide a ferment of opinion directly favorable to the espousal of science.
246
phrase Goethe and speak of "Die Kraft, die stets das Gute will, und stets
das Bose schafft. "53
Insofar as the attitudes of the theologians dominate over the, in effect,
subversive religious ethic-as did Calvin's authority largely in Geneva
until the first part of the eighteenth century-scientific development may
be greatly impeded. For this reason, it is important to discriminate between
the early and late periods of Calvinism. The implications of its dogmas
found expression only with the passage of time. But upon the relaxation of
this hostile influence and with the influx of an ethic, stemming from it and
yet progressively differing from it, science takes on new life, as indeed
was the case in Geneva from about the middle of the eighteenth century. 54
This development was particularly retarded in Geneva because there the
authority resting in Calvin himself, rather than in the implications of his
religious system, was not soon dissipated.
247
The Royal Society was of inestimable importance, both in the propagation of this new point of view and in its actual application. Its achievements gained added stature by contrast with the lethargy of the English
universities. As is well known, the universities were the seats of conservatism and virtual neglect of science, rather than the nurseries of the new
philosophy. It was the learned society that chiefly effected the association
and social interaction of scientists with such signal results. The Philosophical Transactions and later journals greatly expanded upon the previously
prevailing and unsatisfactory mode of communicating scientific ideas
through personal correspondence. Associated with the popularity of
science was the new tendency to write even scientific works in the vernacular-so especial a characteristic of Boyle--or, in any case, to have
English translations of the esoteric Latin and Greek. It was this type of
cumulative interaction between science and society that was destined to
mold a climate of opinion in which science stood high in public esteem,
long after its religious justification had been forgotten.
But in the seventeenth century, this justification was of sterling importance, not only in preparing the social atmosphere for a welcome acceptance of scientific contributions, but also in providing an ultimate aim for
many scientists of the period. For a Barrow, Boyle, or Wilkins, a Ray or
Nehemiah Grew, science found its rationale in the end and all of existence
-His glorification and the Good of Man. Thus, from Boyle: "The
knowledge of the Works of God proportions our Admiration of them,
they participating and disclosing so much of the inexhausted Perfections
of their Author, that the further we contemplate them, the more Footsteps
and Impressions we discover of the Perfections of their Creator; and our
utmost Science can but give us a juster veneration of his Omniscience." 57
Ray carries this conception to its logical conclusion, for if Nature is the
manifestation of His power, then nothing in Nature is too mean for scien57. Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy, pp. 51-52. Boyle continues
in this vein. "God loving, as he deserves, to be honour'd in all our Faculties, and
consequently to be glorified and acknowledged by the acts of Reason, as well as by
those of Faith, there must be sure a great Disparity betwixt that general, confus'd
and lazy Idea we commonly have of his Power and Wisdom, and the distinct, rational
and affecting notions of those Attributes which are form'd by an attentive inspection
of those Creatures in which they are most legible, and which were made chiefly for
that very end" (p. 53). Cf. Ray, Wisdom of God, p. 132; Wilkins, Natural Religion,
p. 236 ff; Isaac Barrow, Opuscula, 4:88 ff. Cf. Nehemiah Grew, Cosmologia Sacra
(London, 1701), who points out that God is "the Original, and Ultimate End" and
that "we are bound to study His works" (pp. 64, 124). Sprat, speaking for the Royal
Society, explicitly defines the place of science in the means-end schema of life. "It
cannot be deny'd, but it lies in the Natural Philosophers hands, best to advance that
part of Divinity [knowledge]: which though it fills not the mind, with such tender,
and powerful contemplations, as that which shews us Man's Redemption by a Mediator, yet it is by no means to be pass'd by unregarded: but is an excellent ground to
establish the other" (History of the Royal-Society, p. 83; also pp. 132-33, and
passim).
248
tific study. 58 The universe and the insect, the macrocosm and microcosm
alike, are indications of "divine Reason, running like a Golden Vein,
through the whole Leaden Mine of Brutal Nature."
On such bases, then, religion was invoked as a sanctioning power of
science. But it is necessary to place this and the similar connections previously noted in proper perspective. For it might seem that I take religion as
the independent and science as the dependent variable during this period,
although, as was remarked at the outset, this is not in the least my intention.
The integration of the Puritan ethic with the accelerated development
of science appears evident, but this is simply to maintain that they were
elements of a culture which was largely centered about the values of
utilitarianism and empiricism. 59 It is perhaps not too much to say, with
Lecky, that the acceptance of every great change of belief depends less
upon the intrinsic force of its doctrines or the personal capabilities of its
proponents than upon the previous social changes which are seena posteriori, it is true-to have brought the new doctrines into congruence
with the dominant conditions and values of the period. The reanimation of
ancient learning; the hesitant, but perceptibly defined, instauration of
science; the groping, yet persistent, intensification of economic tendencies;
the revolt against scholasticism; all helped bring to a focus the social
situation in which the Protestant beliefs and scientific interests both found
acceptance. 60 But to realize this is simply to recognize that both Puritanism
and science were components of a complicated system of mutually dependent variables. If some comprehensible order is to be attained, a simplified
picture of this complex situation must be substituted for the whole; a
defensible procedure only if the provisional formulation is not taken for
a "complete" explanation.
The integration of religious values and many of the values basic to the
contemporary scientists' activity is not fully evidenced by the fact that
58. Wisdom of God, p. 130. "If Man ought to reflect upon his Creator the glory
of all his Works, then ought he to take notice of them all, and not to think anything
unworthy of his Cognizance. And truly the Wisdom, Art and Power of Almighty
God, shines forth as visibly in the Structure of the Body of the minutest Insect, as
in that of a Horse or Elephant.... Let us not then esteem any thing contemptible
or inconsiderable, or below our notice taking; for this is to derogate from the Wisdom and Art of the Creator, and to confess our selves unworthy of those Endowments of Knowledge and Understanding which he hath bestowed upon us." Max
Weber remarks this same attitude of Swammerdam, whom he quotes as saying:
"ich bringe Ihnen hier den Nachweis der Vorsehung Gottes in der Anatomie einer
Laus" (Wissenschaft als Beruf, p. 19). This constant tendency of leading scientists
themselves to relate their studies to dominantly religious ideas gives proof that
religion as a social force was considerable and that its high estimation of any activity
was of moment.
59. See Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus, p. 80 ff., for a lucid expostion of this point.
60. Lecky, History, 1:6.
249
250
251
252
71. Weber, Die Theologie Calvins, p. 31. See Whitehead, Science and the Modern
World, chap. 1, for a statement of similar characteristics of modern science.
72. A modern logican has aptly remarked that the social sciences must locate the
irrational (rather, nonlogical) sources of both rational and irrational thought. Cf.
Rudolf Carnap, "Logic," in Factors Determining Human Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Tercentenary Publications, 1937), p. 118. Certainly Puritanism was not "the
source" of modern science, but apparently it acted to stimulate such thought. Cf.
Walter Pagel's similar comparison of the "irrationality and empiricism" of seventeenth-century religion and science. ("Religious Motives," p. 112.)
253
12
Science
and the
Social Order
1938
About the turn of the century, Max Weber observed that "the belief in
the value of scientific truth is not derived from nature but is a product of
definite cultures." 1 We may now add: and this belief is readily transmuted
into doubt or disbelief. The persistent development of science occurs only
in societies of a certain order, subject to a peculiar complex of tacit presuppositions and institutional constraints. What is for us a normal phenomenon which demands no explanation and secures many self-evident cultural
values, has been in other times and still is in many places abnormal and
infrequent. The continuity of science requires the active participation of
interested and capable persons in scientific pursuits. But this support of
science is assured only by appropriate cultural conditions. It is, then,
important to examine the controls that motivate scientific careers, that
select and give prestige to certain scientific disciplines and reject or blur
others. It will become evident that changes in institutional structure may
curtail, modify, or possibly prevent the pursuit of science. 2
255
256
prominent member of this new race is the Nobel Prize physicist, Werner
Heisenberg, who has persisted in his declaration that Einstein's theory of
relativity constitutes an "obvious basis for further research." 6
In these instances, the sentiments of national and racial purity have
prevailed over utilitarian rationality. The application of such criteria has
led to a greater proportionate loss to the natural science and medical
faculties in German universities than to the theological and juristic faculties, as E. Y. Hartshorne has found. 7 In contrast, utilitarian considerations
are foremost when it comes to official policies concerning the directions to
be followed by scientific research. Scientific work which promises direct
practical benefit to the Nazi party or the Third Reich is to be fostered
above all, and research funds are to be reallocated in accordance with this
policy. 8 The rector of Heidelberg University announces that "the question
of the scientific significance [Wissenschaftlichkeit] of any knowledge is of
quite secondary importance when compared with the question of its
utility. " 9
The general tone of anti-intellectualism, with its depreciation of the
theorist and its glorification of the man of action, 10 may have long-run
6. Cf. the official organ of the SS, the Schwarze Korps, 15 July 1937, p. 2. In this
issue Johannes Stark, the president of the Physikalisch-Technischen Reichsanstalt,
urges elimination of such collaborations which still continue and protests the appointment of three university professors who have been "disciples" of non-Aryans. See also
Hartshorne, The German Universities, pp 112-13; Alfred Rosenberg, Wesen, Grundsiitze und Ziele der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei (Munich: E.
Boepple, 1933 ), p. 45 ff.; J. Stark, "Philipp Lenard als deutscher Naturforscher,"
Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 71 (1936): 106-11, where Heisenberg, Schrodinger, von Laue, and Planck are castigated for not having divorced themselves from
the "Jewish physics" of Einstein. See also chapter 5 of this volume.
1. The data upon which this statement is based are from an unpublished study
by E. Y. Hartshorne.
8. Cf. Wissenschaft und Vierjahresplan, Reden anliisslich der Kundgebung des
NSD-Dozentenbundes, 18 January 1937; Hartshorne, The German Universities, p.
110 ff.; E. R. Jaensch, Zur Neugestaltung des deutschen Studententums und der Hochschule (Leipzig: J. A. Bart, 1937), esp. p. 57 ff. In the field of history, for example,
Walter Frank, the director of the Reichsinstitut fiir Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands, "the first German scientific organization which has been created by the spirit of
the national-socialistic revolution," testifies that he is the last person to forgo sympathy for the study of ancient history, "even that of foreign peoples," but also points
out that the funds previously granted the Archaeological Institute must be reallocated
to this new historical body which will "have the honor of writing the history of the
National Socialist Revolution." See his Zukunft und Nation (Hamburg: Hanseatische
Verlagsanstalt, 1935), esp. pp. 30 ff.
9. Ernst Krieck, Nationalpolitische Erziehung (Leipzig: Armanen Verlag, 1935),
p. 8.
10. The Nazi theoretician, Alfred Baeumler, writes: "Wenn ein Student heute es
ablehnt, sich der politischen Norm zu unterstellen, es z. B ablehnt, an einem Arbeitsoder Wehrsportlager teilzunehmen, weil er damit Zeit fiir sein Studium versiiume,
dann zeigt er damit, dass er nichts von dem begriffen hat, was urn ibn geschieht.
Seine Zeit kann er nur bei einem abstrakten, richtungslosen Studium versiiumen"
(Miinnerbund und Wissenschaft [Berlin: Junker & Diimihaupt, 1934], p. 153).
257
rather than immediate bearing upon the place of science in Germany. For
should these attitudes become fixed, the most gifted elements of the
population may be expected to shun those intellectual disciplines which
have become disreputable. By the late thirties, effects of this anti-theoretical
attitude could be detected in the allocation of academic interests in the
German universities. 11
It would be misleading to suggest that the Nazi government has completely repudiated science and intellect. The official attitudes toward
science are clearly ambivalent and unstable. (For this reason, any statements concerning science in Nazi Germany are made under correction.)
On the one hand, the challenging skepticism of science interferes with
the imposition of a new set of values which demand an unquestioning
acquiescence. But the new dictatorships must recognize, as did Hobbes
who also argued that the State must be all or nothing, that science is
power. For military, economic, and political reasons, theoretical scienceto say nothing of its more respectable sibling, technology-cannot be
safely discarded. Experience has shown that the most esoteric researches
have found important applications. Unless utility and rationality are
dismissed beyond recall, it cannot be forgotten that Clerk Maxwell's
speculations on the ether led Hertz to the discovery that culminated in the
wireless. And indeed one Nazi spokesman remarks: "As the practice of
today rests on the science of yesterday, so is the research of today the
practice of tomorrow." 12 Emphasis on utility requires an unbanishable
minimum of interest in science which can be enlisted in the service of
the State and industry. 13 At the same time, this emphasis leads to a limitation of research in pure science.
258
259
260
one Nazi theorist put it, "the universal meaning of the political is recognized"19-this assumption is impugned. Scientific findings are held to be
merely the expression of race or class or nation. 20 As such doctrines percolate to the laity, they invite a general distrust of science and a depreciation of the prestige of the scientist, whose discoveries appear arbitrary
and fickle. This variety of anti-intellectualism which threatens his social
position is characteristically enough resisted by the scientist. On the ideological front as well, totalitarianism entails a conflict with the traditional
assumptions of modern Western science.
261
262
263
In short, this basis for the revaluation of science derives from what I
have called elsewhere the "imperious immediacy of interest." 25 Cqncern
with the primary goal, the furtherance of knowledge, is coupled with a
disregard of the consequences that lie outside the area of immediate interest, but these social results react so as to interfere with the original pursuits.
Such behavior may be rational in the sense that it may be expected to lead
to the satisfaction of the immediate interest. But it is irrational in the sense
that it defeats other values which are not, at the moment, paramount but
which are nonetheless an integral part of the social scale of values. Precisely because scientific research is not conducted in a social vacuum, its
effects ramify into other spheres of value and interest. Insofar as these
effects are deemed socially undesirable, science is charged with responsibility. The goods of science are no longer considered an unqualified blessing. Examined from this perspective, the tenet of pure science and disinterestedness has helped to prepare its own epitaph.
Battle lines are drawn in terms of the question: can a good tree bring
forth evil fruit? Those who would cut down or stunt the tree of knowledge
because of its accursed fruit are met with the claim that the evil fruit has
been grafted on the good tree by the agents of state and economy. It may
salve the conscience of the individual man of science to hold that an inadequate social structure has led to the perversion of his discoveries. But
this will hardly satisfy an embittered opposition. Just as the motives of
scientists may range from a passionate desire in the furtherance of knowledge to a profound interest in achieving personal fame and just as the
functions of scientific research may vary from providing prestige-laden
rationalizations of the existing order to enlarging our control of nature, so
may other social effects of science be considered pernicious to society or
result in the modification of the scientific ethos itself. There is a tendency
for scientists to assume that the social effects of science must be beneficial
in the long run. This article of faith performs the function of providing a
rationale for scientific research, but it is manifestly not a statement of fact.
It involves the confusion of truth and social utility which is characteristically found in the nonlogical penumbra of science.
264
necessarily subscribed to a cult of unintelligibility. There results an increasing gap between the scientist and the laity. The layman must take on faith
the publicized statements about relativity or quanta or other such esoteric
subjects. This he has readily done inasmuch as he has been repeatedly
assured that the technologic achievements from which he has presumably
benefited ultimately derive from such research. Nonetheless, he retains a
certain suspicion of these bizarre theories. Popularized and frequently
garbled versions of the new science stress the theories that seem to run
counter to common sense. To the public mind, science and esoteric terminology become indissolubly linked. The presumably scientific pronouncements of totalitarian spokesmen on race or economy or history are for the
uninstructed laity of the same order as announcements concerning an
expanding universe or wave mechanics. In both instances, the laity is in
no position to understand these conceptions or to check their scientific
validity and in both instances they may not be consistent with common
sense. If anything, the myths of totalitarian theorists will seem more plausible and are certainly more comprehensible to the general public .than
accredited scientific theories; since they are closer to common-sense experience and cultural bias. Partly as a result of scientific advance, therefore,
the population at large has become ripe for new mysticisms clothed in
apparently scientific jargon. This promotes the success of propaganda
generally. The borrowed authority of science becomes a powerful prestige
symbol for unscientific doctrines.
265
other attitudes toward these same data which have been crystallized and
frequently ritualized by other institutions. Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.
Every institution involves, in this sense, a sacred area that is resistant to
profane examination in terms of scientific observation and logic. The institution of science itself involves emotional adherence to certain values. But
whether it be the sacred sphere of political convictions or religious faith
or economic rights, the scientific investigator does not conduct himself in
the prescribed uncritical and ritualistic fashion. He does not preserve the
cleavage between the sacred and the profane, between that which requires
uncritical respect and that which can be objectively analyzed. 28
It is this which in part lies at the root of revolts against the so-called
intrusion of science into other spheres. In the past, this resistance has come
for the most part from the church which restrains the scientific examination
of sanctified doctrines. Textual criticism of the Bible is still suspect. This
resistance on the part of organized religion has become less significant as
the locus of social power has shifted to economic and political institutions
which in their tum evidence an undisguised antagonism toward that generalized skepticism which is felt to challenge the bases of institutional
stability. This opposition may exist quite apart from the introduction of
scientific discoveries that appear to invalidate particular dogmas of church,
economy, and state. It is rather a diffuse, frequently vague, recognition
that skepticism threatens the status quo. It must be emphasized again that
there is no logical necessity for a conflict between skepticism within the
sphere of science and the emotional adherences demanded by other institutions. But as a psychological derivative, this conflict invariably appears
whenever science extends its research to new fields toward which there are
institutionalized attitudes or whenever other institutions extend their area
of control. In the totalitarian society, the centralization of institutional
control is the major source of opposition to science; in other structures,
the extension of scientific research is of greater importance. Dictatorship
organizes, centralizes, and hence intensifies sources of revolt against science
that in a liberal structure remain unorganized, diffuse, and often latent.
In a liberal society, integration derives primarily from the body of cultural norms toward which human activity is oriented. In a dictatorial structure, integration is effected primarily by formal organization and centralization of social control. Readiness to accept this control is instilled by
speeding up the process of infusing the body politic with new cultural
values, by substituting high-pressure propaganda for the slower process of
the diffuse inculcation of social standards. The differences in the mecha28. For a general discussion of the sacred in these terms, see Emile Durkheim,
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, pp. 37 If.
266
13
The Normative
Structure of
Science
1942
268
269
norms which is held to be binding on the man of science. 2 The norms are
expressed in the form of prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences, and permissions. They are legitimatized in terms of institutional values. These
imperatives, transmitted by precept and example and reenforced by sanctions are in varying degrees internalized by the scientist, thus fashioning
his scientific conscience or, if one prefers the latter-day phrase, his superego. Although the ethos of science has not been codified, 3 it can be inferred
from the moral consensus of scientists as expressed in use and wont, in
countless writings on the scientific spirit and in moral indignation directed
toward contraventions of the ethos.
An examination of the ethos of modern science is only a limited introduction to a larger problem: the comparative study of the institutional
structure of science. Although detailed monographs assembling the needed
comparative materials are few and scattered, they provide some basis for
the provisional assumption that "science is afforded opportunity for development in a democratic order which is integrated with the ethos of science." This is not to say that the pursuit of science is confined to democracies.4 The most diverse social structures have provided some measure of
support to science. We have only to remember that the Accademia del
Cimento was sponsored by two Medicis; that Charles II claims historical
attention for his grant of a charter to the Royal Society of London and his
sponsorship of the Greenwich Observatory; that the Academic des Sciences
was founded under the auspices of Louis XIV, on the advice of Colbert;
that urged into acquiescence by Leibniz, Frederick I endowed the Berlin
Academy, and that the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences was instituted
by Peter the Great (to refute the view that Russians are barbarians). But
such historical facts do not imply a random association of science and
social structure. There is the further question of the ratio of scientific
achievement to scientific potentialities. Science develops in various social
2. On the concept of ethos, see William Graham Sumner, Folkways (Boston: Ginn,
1906), pp. 36 ff.; Hans Speier, "The Social Determination of Ideas," Social Research
5 (1938): 196 ff.; Max Scheler, Schriften aus dem Nachlass (Berlin, 1933), 1:22562. Albert Bayet, in his book on the subject, soon abandons description and analysis
for homily; see his La morale de Ia science (Paris, 1931 ) .
3. As Bayet remarks: "Cette morale [de la science] n'a pas eu ses theoriciens,
mais elle a eu ses artisans. Elle n'a pas exprime son ideal, mais elle l'a servi: il est
implique dans !'existence meme de la science" (La morale de Ia science, p. 43).
4. Tocqueville went further: "The future will prove whether these passions [for
science], at once so rare and so productive, come into being and into growth as easily
in the midst of democratic as in aristocratic communities. For myself, I confess that
I am slow to believe it" (Democracy in America [New York, 1898], 2: 51). See
another reading of the evidence: "It is impossible to establish a simple causal relationship between democracy and science and to state that democratic society alone
can furnish the soil suited for the development of science. It cannot be a mere
coincidence, however, that science actually has flourished in democratic periods"
(Henry E. Sigerist, "Science and Democracy," Science and Society 2 [1938]: 291).
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
Organized Skepticism
As we have seen in the preceding chapter, organized skepticism is variously interrelated with the other elements of the scientific ethos. It is both
a methodological and an institutional mandate. The temporary suspension
of judgment and the detached scrutiny of beliefs in terms of empirical and
logical criteria have periodically involved science in conflict with other
institutions. Science which asks questions of fact, including potentialities,
concerning every aspect of nature and society may come into conflict with
other attitudes toward these same data which have been crystallized and
often ritualized by other institutions. The scientific investigator does not
preserve the cleavage between the sacred and the profane, between that
21. Cf. R. A. Brady, The Sprit and Structure of German Fascism (New York:
Viking, 1937), chap. 2; Martin Gardner, In the Name of Science (New York:
Putnam's, 1953).
22. Francis Bacon set forth one of the early and most succinct statements of this
popular pragmatism: "Now these two directions-the one active, the other contemplative-are one and the same thing; and what in operation is most useful,. that in
knowledge is most true" (Novum Organum, book 2, aphorism 4).
278
which requires uncritical respect and that which can be objectively analyzed.
As we have noted, this appears to be the source of revolts against the
so-called intrusion of science into other spheres. Such resistance on the
part of organized religion has become less significant as compared with
that of economic and political groups. The opposition may exist quite
apart from the introduction of specific scientific discoveries which appear
to invalidate particular dogmas of church, economy, or state. It is rather
a diffuse, frequently vague, apprehension that skepticism threatens the
current distribution of power. Conflict becomes accentuated whenever
science extends its research to new areas toward which there are institutionalized attitudes or whenever other institutions extend their control over
science. In modern totalitarian society, anti-rationalism and the centralization of institutional control both serve to limit the scope provided for
scientific activity.
The
Reward
System of
Science
Part
Prefatory Note
With the papers in this section we
come to the heart of the Mertonian
paradigm-the powerful juxtaposition of the normative structure of
science with its institutionally
distinctive reward system-as it
provides a simplified but basic
model of the structure and dynamics
of the scientific community. Published within a period of seven
years, just at the time when other
American sociologists were beginning to see in the field an attractive
focus for research, these papers
demonstrate how basic theoretical
formulations can open the doors to
a quick succession of investigations
by others who capitalize on the
opening wedge. In this section, of
course, the papers are all by Merton,
but the principle holds, and the
record amply supports it. Within
two years of the 1957 paper both
Warren 0. Hagstrom and this writer
were at work on doctoral dissertations that drew heavily on the newly
developed paradigm, and in the
next decade or so more had been
contributed by Crane, Zuckerman,
Mullins, Stephen Cole, Jonathan
Cole, Gaston, and a good many
others than had been published in
the forty years before. 1
The central topic of these papers
is cognitive achievement as it is
enmeshed in the social matrix of
science. Matters of priority, of the
ubiquity of multiple discovery, and
of scientists' attitudes towards the
circumstances and consequences of
282
Prefatory Note
283
practices, but not until this paper did the elements of the paradigm all
fall into place. Neither the abstract statement of the norms of science nor
the conception of professional recognition as the institutionally central
reward for scientific achievement could separately point to the sources of
various forms of deviant behavior in science. But in combination, as here,
they add dimension and organization to what had previously been little
more than a congeries of unconnected incidents involving the "unfortunate"
misbehavior of particular scientists. The basic idea of interaction between
the normative structure and the reward structure of science provides a
solid foundation for the understanding of science as a social institution.
From one point of view, the paper is an extension of the thesis Merton
propounded in "The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social
Action" (1936) and greatly developed soon after in "Social Structure and
Anomie" (1938). This is the idea that extreme institutional emphasis
upon recognized achievement, greatly encouraged by the reward system,
can be as dysfunctional for human purposes and social institutions as the
systematic flouting of norms. Moreover, the one leads to the other. From
another point of view, the paper copes with the general sociological
problem, identified by Merton in his paper "Problem-Finding in Sociology,"2 of "how to account for regularities of social behavior that are not
prescribed by cultural norms or that are even at odds with those norms.
It casts doubt on the familiar assumption that uniformities of social
behavior necessarily represent conformity to norms calling for that
behavior."
The theoretical approach adopted in his "Priorities" paper generates
a systematic awareness of the varieties of pathogenic situations that occur
within the scientific community and raises meaningful questions about a
broader range of subjects: the consequences of inequalities in the productivity of scientists, the degree of equity in the system through which professional recognition is allocated, and even some of the myths to which
observers of the work of science and some working scientists themselves
subscribe.
One such myth, recently gaining wide currency, is that the competition
among scientists for priority is something new-that it results entirely
from the greatly increased size, afH.uence, and prominence of science in
the modem era. This belief has shown up frequently in the reviews of
The Double Helix, 8 James D. Watson's recollections, published in 1968,
of the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule which won the
Nobel Prize for him and Francis Crick. Appearing more than a decade
2. Sociology Today, 1957, p. xxiii.
3. For a critical overview by a molecular biologist of six reviews of The Double
Helix, including the one by Merton, see Gunther S. Stent, "What Are They Saying
about Honest Jim?" The Quarterly Journal of Biology 43 (June 1968): 179-84.
284
Prefatory Note
285
14
Priorities in
Scientific
Discovery
1957
We can only guess what historians of the future will say about the condition of present-day sociology. But it seems safe to anticipate one of
their observations. When the Trevelyans of 2050 come to write that
history-as they well might, for this clan of historians promises to go on
forever-they will doubtless find it strange that so few sociologists (and
historians) of the twentieth century could bring themselves, in their work,
to treat science as one of the great social institutions of the time. They will
observe that long after the sociology of science became an identifiable field
of inquiry, 1 it remained little cultivated in a world where science loomed
large enough to present mankind with the choice of destruction or survival.
They may even suggest that somewhere in the process by which social
scientists take note of the world as it is and as it once was, a sense of
values appears to have become badly scrambled.
This spacious area of neglect may therefore have room for a paper
which tries to examine science as a social institution, not in the large but
in terms of a few of its principal components.
We begin by noting the great frequency with which the history of science
This essay was read as a presidential address at the annual meeting of the American
Sociological Society, August 1957. It was first published in American Sociological
Review 22, no. 6 (December 1957): 635-59, and is reprinted by permission of the
American Sociological Association.
1. The rudiments of a sociology of science can be found in an overview of the
subject by Bernard Barber, Science and the Social Order (Glencoe: The Free Press,
287
288
tested priority not only with Newton but with Huygens over the important
invention of the spiral-spring balance for regulating watches to eliminate
the effect of gravity.
The calendar of disputes was full also in the eighteenth century. Perhaps
the most tedious and sectarian of these was the great "Water Controversy"
in which that shy, rich, and noble genius of science, Henry Cavendish, was
pushed into a three-way tug-of-war with Watt and Lavoisier over the
question of which one had first demonstrated the compound nature of
water .and thereby removed it from its millennia-long position as one of the
elements. Earthy battles raged also over claims to the first discovery of
heavenly bodies, as in the case of the most dramatic astronomical discovery
of the century in which the Englishman John Couch Adams and the
Frenchman Urban Jean LeVerrier inferred the existence and predicted the
position of the planet now known as Neptune, which was found where
their independent computations showed it would be. Medicine had its
share of conflicts over priority; for example, Jenner believed himself first
to demonstrate that vaccination afforded security against smallpox, but
the advocates of Pearson and Rabaut believed otherwise.
Throughout the nineteenth century and down to the present, disputes
over priority continued to be frequent and intense. Lister knew he had first
introduced antisepsis, but others insisted that Lemaire had done so before.
The sensitive and modest Faraday was wounded by the claims of others to
several of his major discoveries in physics: one among these, the discovery
of electro-magnetic rotation, was said to have been made before by Wollaston; Faraday's onetime mentor, Sir Humphrey Davy (who had himself
been involved in similar disputes) actually opposed Faraday's election to
the Royal Society on the ground that his was not the original discovery. 4
Laplace, several of the Bernoullis, Legendre, Gauss, Cauchy were only a
few of the giants among mathematicians embroiled in quarrels over
priority.
What is true of physics, chemistry, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics is true also of all other scientific disciplines, not excluding the social
and psychological sciences. As we know, sociology was officially born
only after a long period of abnormally severe labor. Nor was the postpartum any more tranquil. It was disturbed by violent controversies
between the followers of St-Simon and Comte as they quarreled over the
delicate question of which of the two was the father of sociology and which
merely the obstetrician. And to come to the very recent past, Janet is but
one among several who have claimed that they had the essentials of
psychoanalysis before Freud.
4. Bence Jones, The Life and Letters of Faraday (London: Longmans, Green,
1870), 1:336-52.
289
To extend the list of priority fights would be industrious and, for this
occasion, superfluous. For the moment, it is enough to note that these
controversies, far from being a rare exception in science, have long been
frequent, harsh, and ugly. They have practically become an integral part
of the social relations between scientists. Indeed, the pattern is so common
that the Germans have characteristically compounded a word for it,
Prioritiitsstreit.
On the face of it, the pattern of conflict over priority can be easily
explained. It seems to be merely a consequence of the same discoveries
being made simultaneously, or nearly so, a recurrent event in the history
of science which has not exactly escaped the notice of sociologists, or of
others, at least since the definitive work of William Ogburn and Dorothy
Thomas. But on second glance, the matter does not appear quite so simple.
The bunching of similar or identical discoveries in science is only an
occasion 5 for disputes over priority, not their cause or their grounds. After
all, scientists also know that discoveries are often made independently.
(As we shall see, they not only know this but fear it, and this often
activates a rush to ensure their priority.) It would therefore seem a simple
matter for scientists to acknowledge that their simultaneous discoveries
were independent and that the question of priority is consequently beside
the point. On occasion, this is just what has happened, as we shall see in
that most moving of all cases of noblesse oblige in the history of science,
when Darwin and Wallace tried to outdo one another in giving credit to
the other for what each had separately worked out. Fifty years after the
event, Wallace was still insisting upon the contrast between his own hurried
work, written within a week after the great idea came to him, and Darwin's
work, based on twenty years of collecting evidence. "I was then (as often
since) the 'young man in a hurry,'" said the reminiscing Wallace; "he,
the painstaking and patient student seeking ever the full demonstration of
the truth he had discovered, rather than to achieve immediate personal
fame." 6
On other occasions, self-denial has gone even further. For example,
the incomparable Euler withheld his long-sought solution to the calculus
of variations until the twenty-three-year-old Lagrange, who had developed
a new method needed to reach the solution, could put it into print, " 'so as
not to deprive you,' Euler informed the young man, 'of any part of the
5. And not always even the occasion. Disputes over priority have occurred when
alleged or actual anticipations of an idea have been placed decades or, at times, even
centuries or millennia earlier, when they are generally described as "rediscoveries."
6. This remark is taken from Wallace's commentary at the semicentenary of the
joint discovery, a classic of self-abnegation that deserves to be rescued from the nearoblivion into which it has fallen. For a transcript, see James Marchant, Alfred Russel
Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences (New York: Harper, 1916), pp. 91-96.
290
glory which is your due.' " 7 Apart from these and many other examples of
generosity in the annals of science, there have doubtless been many more
that never found their way into the pages of history. Nevertheless, the
recurrent struggles for priority, with all their intensity of affect, far overshadow these cases of noblesse oblige, and it still remains necessary to
account for them.
Alleged sources of conflicts over priority
One explanation of these disputes would regard them as mere expressions
of human nature. On this view, egotism is natural to the species; scientists,
being human, will have their due share and will sometimes express their
egotism through self-aggrandizing claims to priority. But, of course, this
interpretation does not stand up. The history of social thought is strewn
with the corpses of those who have tried, in their theory, to make the
hazardous leap from human nature to particular forms of social conduct,
as has been observed from the time of Montesquieu, through Comte and
Durkheim, to the present. 8
A second explanation derives these conflicts not from the original nature
shared by all men, but from propensities toward egotism found among
some men. It assumes that, like other occupations, the occupation of
science attracts some ego-centered people, and assumes further that it
might even attract many such people, who, hungry for fame, elect to enter
a profession that promises enduring fame to the successful. Unlike the
argument from nature, this one, dealing with processes of self-selection
and of social selection, is not defective in principle. It is possible that
differing kinds of personalities tend to be recruited by various occupations,
and, though I happen to doubt it, it is possible that quarrelsome or contentious personalities are especially apt to be attracted to science and
recruited into it. The extent to which this is so is a still unanswered question, but developing inquiry into the type of personality characteristic of
those entering the various professions may in due course discover how far
it is so. 9 In any event, it should not be difficult to find some aggressive men
of science.
7. E. T. Bell, Men of Mathematics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937), pp.
155-56. And see the comparable act of generosity on the part of the venerable
Legendre toward the mathematical genius, Niels Abel, then in his twenties (ibid., p.
337).
8. Emile Durkheim had traced this basic theme in sociological theory as early as
his Latin thesis of 1892, which has fortunately been translated into French for the
benefit of some of us later sociologists. See his Montesquieu et Rousseau: Precurseurs
de Ia Sociologie (Paris: Marcel Riviere, 1953 ), esp. chapter 1.
9. Information about this is sparse and unsatisfactory. As a bare beginning, a study
of the Thematic Apperception Test protocols of 64 eminent biological, physical, and
social scientists found no signs of their being "particularly aggressive." See Anne Roe,
The Making of a Scientist (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1953), p. 192.
291
292
scientist himself, who insinuated that the young Faraday had usurped
credit for the experiments on electro-magnetic rotation. 12 Similarly, it was
Priestley, De Luc, and Blagden, "all men eminent in science and of unblemished character," who embroiled the shy Cavendish and the unassertive Watt in the Water Controversy. 13 Finally, it was the quarrelsome,
eminent, and justly esteemed scientist Fran~ois Arago (whom we shall
meet again) and a crowd of astronomers, principally in France and
England but also in Germany and Russia, rather than Adams, "the shy,
gentle and unaffected" co-discoverer of Neptune, who heated the pot of
conflict over priority until it boiled over and then simmered down into
general acknowledgement that the planet had been independently discovered by Adams and LeVerrier. 14 And so on, in one after another of the
historic quarrels over priority in science.
Now these argumentative associates and bystanders stand to gain little
or nothing from successfully prosecuting the claims of their candidate,
except in the pickwickian sense of having identified themselves with him
or with the nation of which they are all a part. Their behavior can scarcely
be explained by egotism. They do not suffer from rival claims to precedence. Their personal status is not being threatened. And yet, over and
again, they take up the cudgels in the status-battle 15 and, uninhibited by
any semblance of indulging in self-praise, express their great moral indignation over the outrage being perpetrated upon their candidate.
This is, I believe, a particularly significant fact. For, as we know from
the sociological theory of institutions, the expression of disinterested moral
indignation is a signpost announcing the violation of a social norm. 16
Although the indignant bystanders are themselves not injured by what they
take to be the misbehavior of the culprit, they respond with hostility. They
want to see "fair play," to see that behavior conforms to the rules of the
12. Jones, Faraday, pp. 351-52; see also the informative book by T. W. Chalmers,
Historic Researches: Chapters in the History of Physical and Chemical Discovery
(New York: Scribner's, 1952), p. 54.
13. This is the contemporary judgment by Wilson, Henry Cavendish, pp. 63-64.
14. Sir Harold Spencer Jones, "John Couch Adams and the Discovery of Neptune,"
reprinted in James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1956), 2:822-39. A list of cases in which associates, rather than principals,
took the lead in these conflicts is a very long one. I do not include it here.
15. Sometimes, of course, they act as judges and arbitrators rather than advocates,
as was true of Lyell and Hooker in the episode involving Darwin and Wallace. But,
as we shall see, the same institutional norms are variously called into play in all these
cases.
16. For an acute analysis of the theoretical place of. moral obligation and its correlate, moral indignation, in the theory of institutions, particularly as this was developed in the long course of Durkheim's work, see Talcott Parsons, The Structure of
Social Action (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1949), pp. 368-470; for further formulations
and citations of additional literature, see R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social
Structure, rev. ed. (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 361 ff.
293
game. The very fact of their entering the fray goes to show that science
is a social institution with a distinctive body of norms exerting moral
authority and that these norms are invoked particularly when it is felt that
they are being violated. In this sense, fights over priority, with all their
typical vehemence and passionate feelings, are not merely expressions of
hot tempers, although these may of course raise the temperature of controversy; basically, they constitute responses to what are taken to be violations
of the institutional norms of intellectual property.
294
295
296
when one of their number has had his rights to priority denied or challenged. Even though they have no personal stake in the particular episode,
they feel strongly about the single property-norm and the expression of
their hostility serves the latent function of reaffirming the moral validity
of this norm.
National claims to priority
297
298
despis'd at last? How few must there needs be, who wiii be willing, to be
impoverish'd for the common good? while they shall see, all the rewards,
which might give life to their Industry, passing by them, and bestow'd on the
deserts of easier studies?25
The echo of these complaints still Jeverberates in the halls of universities
and scientific societies, but chiefly with regard to material rather than
honorific rewards. With the growth and professionalization of science, the
system of honorific rewards has become diversely elaborated, and apparently at an accelerated rate.
Heading the list of the immensely varied forms of recognition long in
use is eponymy, 26 the practice of affixing the name of the scientist to all
or part of what he has found, as with the Copernican system, Hooke's law,
Planck's constant, or Halley's comet. In this way, scientists leave their
signatures indelibly in history; their names enter into all the scientific
languages of the world.
At the rugged and thinly populated peak of this system of eponymy are
the men who have put their stamp upon the science and thought of their
age. Such men are naturally in very short supply, and these few sometimes
have an entire epoch named after them, as when we speak of the Newtonian epoch, the Darwinian era, or the Freudian age.
The gradations of eponymy have the character of a Guttman scale in
which those men assigned highest rank are also assigned lesser degrees of
honorific recognition. Accordingly, these peerless scientists are typically
included also in the next highest ranks of eponymy, in which they are
credited with having fathered a new science or a new branch of science
(at times, according to the heroic theory, through a kind of parthenogenesis for which they apparently needed no collaborators). Of the
illustrious Fathers of this or that science (or of this or that specialty), there
is an end, but an end not easily reached. Consider only these few, culled
from a list many times this length:
Morgagni, the Father of Pathology;
Cuvier, the Father of Palaeontology;
Faraday, the Father of Electrotechnics;
Daniel Bernoulli, the Father of Mathematical Physics;
Bichat, the Father of Histology;
van Leeuwenhoek, the Father of Protozoology and Bacteriology;
25. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), p. 27.
26. In his dedication to "The Starry Messenger," announcing his discovery of the
satellites of Jupiter, Galileo begins with a paean to the practice of eponymy which
opens with these words: "Surely a distinguished public service has been rendered by
those who have protected from envy the noble achievements of men who have excelled in virtue, and have thus preserved from oblivion and neglect those names which
deserve immortality" (Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, p. 23). He then
proceeds to call the satellites "the Medicean Stars" in honor of the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, who soon becomes his patron.
299
300
Each science, or art based on science, evolves its own distinctive patterns
of eponymy to honor those who have made it what it is. In the medical
sciences, for example, the attention of posterity is assured to the discoverer
or first describer of parts of the body (as with the Eustachian tube, the
circle of Willis, Graffian follicles, Wharton's duct, and the canal of Nuck)
though, oddly enough, Vesalius, commonly described as the Father of
Modern Anatomy, has been accorded no one part of the body as distinctly
his own. In medicine, also, eponymy registers the first diagnostician of a
disease (as with Addison's, Bright's Hodgkin's, Meniere's, and Parkinson's
diseases); the inventor of diagnostic tests (as with Romberg's sign, the
Wassermann reaction, the Calmette test, and the Babinski reflex); and
the inventor of instruments used in research or practice (as with the Kelly
pad, the Kelly clamp, and the Kelly rectoscope). Yet, however numerous
and diversified this array of eponyms in medicine, 27 they are still reserved,
of course, to only a small fraction of the many who have labored in the
medical vineyard. Eponymy is a prize that, though large in abs@lute
aggregate, is limited to the relatively few.
Time does not permit, nor does the occasion require, detailed examination of eponymous practices in all the other sciences. Consider, then, only
two other patterns: In a special branch of physics, it became the practice
to honor great physicists by attaching their names to electrical and magnetic units (as with volt, ohm, ampere, coulomb, farad, joule, watt, henry,
maxwell, gauss, gilbert, and oersted). In biology, it is the long-standing
practice to append the name of the first describer to the name of a species,
a custom which greatly agitated Darwin since, as he saw it, this put "a
premium on hasty and careless work" as the "species-mongers" among
naturalists try to achieve an easy immortality by "miserably describ[ing]
a species in two or three lines." 28 (This, I may say, will not be the last
occasion for us to see how the system of rewards in science can be stepped
up to such lengths as to get out of hand and defeat its original purposes.)
Eponymy is only the most enduring and perhaps most prestigious kind
of recognition institutionalized in science. Were the reward system confined
to this, it would not provide for the many other distinguished scientists
27. It has been suggested that, in medicine at least, eponymous titles are given
to diseases only so long as they are poorly understood. "Any disease designated by an
eponym is a good subject for research" (0. H. Perry, Medical Etymology [Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co., 1949], pp. 11-12).
28. Exercised by the excesses eponymy in natural history had reached, the usually
mild Darwin repeatedly denounced this "miserable and degrading passion of mere
species naming." What is most in point for us is the way in which the pathological
exaggeration of eponymizing highlights the normal role of eponymy in providing its
share of incentives for serious and sustained work in science. Francis Darwin, ed.,
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (New York: Appleton, 1925), vol. 1, pp.
332-44.
301
without whose work the revolutionary discoveries could not have been
made. Graded rewards in the coin of the scientific realm-honorific
recognition by fellow-scientists-are distributed among the stratified layers
of scientific accomplishment. Merely to list some of these other but still
considerable forms of recognition will perhaps be enough to remind us of
the complex structure of the reward system in science.
In recent generations, the Nobel Prize, with nominations for it made by
scientists of distinction throughout the world, is perhaps the preeminent
token of recognized achievement in science. 29 There is also an iconography
of fame in science, with medals honoring famous scientists and the recipients of the award alike (as with the Rumford medal and the Arago medal).
Beyond these, are memberships in honorary academies and sciences (for
example, the Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences), and
fellowships in national and local societies. In those nations that still preserve
a titled aristocracy, scientists have been ennobled, as in England since the
time when Queen Anne added laurels to her crown by knighting Newton,
not, as might be supposed, because of his superb administrative work as
Master of the Mint, but for his scientific discoveries. These things move
slowly; it required almost two centuries before another Queen of England
would, in 1892, confer a peerage of the realm upon a man of science for
his work in science, and thus transform the preeminent Sir William
Thomson into the no less eminent Lord Kelvin. 30 Scientists themselves
have distinguished the stars from the supporting cast by issuing directories
of "starred men of science," and universities have been known to accord
honorary degrees to scientists along with the larger company of philanthropists, industrialists, businessmen, statesmen, and politicians.
Recognition is finally allocated by those guardians of posthumous fame,
the historians of science. From the most disciplined scholarly works to the
vulgarized and sentimentalized accounts designed for the millions, great
attention is paid to priority of discovery, to the iteration and reiteration
of "firsts." In this way, many historians of science help maintain the prevailing institutional emphasis on the importance of priority. One of the
most eminent among them, the late George Sarton, at once expresses and
exemplifies the commemorative function of historiography when he writes
that "the first scholar to conceive that subject [the history of science] as an
independent discipline and to realize its importance was . . . Auguste
29. On the machinery and results of the Nobel and other prize awards, see Barber,
Science and the Social Order, pp. 108 ff.; and Leo Moulin, "The Nobel Prizes for the
Sciences, 1901-1950," British Journal of Sociology 6 (September 1955): 246-63.
30. For caustic comment on the lag in according such recognition to men of
science, see excerpts from newspapers of the day in Silvanus P. Thompson, The Life
of William Thomson: Baron Kelvin of Largs (London: Macmillan, 1910), vol. 2,
pp. 906-7.
302
303
304
305
It would appear, then, that the institution of science, like other institutions, incorporates potentially incompatible values: among them, the value
of originality, which leads scientists to want their priority to be recognized,
and the value of humility, which leads them to insist on how little they
have been able to accomplish. These values are not real contradictories,
of course-" 'tis a poor thing, but mine own"-but they do call for opposed
kinds of behavior. To blend these potential incompatibles41 into a single
orientation, to reconcile them in practice, is no easy matter. Rather, as we
shall now see, the tension between these kindred values-kindred as Cain
and Abel were kin--creates an inner conflict among men of science who
have internalized both of them and generates a distinct ambivalence toward the claiming of priorities.
Ambivalence toward Priority
The components of this ambivalence are fairly clear. After all, to insist
on one's originality by claiming priority is not exactly humble and to dismiss one's priority by ignoring it is not exactly to affirm the value of originality.42 As a result of this conflict, scientists come to despise themselves
for wanting that which the institutional values of science have led them
to want.
With the rare candor that distinguishes him, Darwin so clearly exhibits
this agitated ambivalence in its every detail that this one case can be taken
as paradigmatic for many others (which are matters of less-detailed and
less candid record). In his Autobiography, he writes that, even before his
historic voyage on the Beagle in 1831, he was "ambitious to take a fair
place among scientific men-whether more ambitious or less so than most
of my fellow-workers, I can form no opinion. " 43 A quarter of a century
41. For further examination of the problem of blending incompatible norms into
stable patterns of behavior, in this case among physicians, see R. K. Merton, "Some
Preliminaries to a Sociology of Medical Education," in R. K. Merton, G. G. Reader,
and P. L. Kendall, eds., The Student-Physician (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1957), p. 72 ff. As is well known, R. S. Lynd has set forth the general notion
that institutional norms are organized as near-incompatibles; see his Knowledge for
What? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), chapter 3.
42. Strictly speaking, originality and priority are of course not the same thing. Belated independent rediscoveries of what was long since known may represent great
originality on the part of the rediscoverer, as is perhaps best shown in the remarkable case of the self-taught twentieth-century Indian mathematician, Srinivasa
Ramanujan, who, all unknowing that it had been done before, re-created much of
early nineteenth-century mathematics, and more besides. Cf. G. H. Hardy Ramanujan:
Twelve Lectures Suggested by His Life and Work (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1940). Edwin G. Boring, who has long been interested in the subject of
priority in science, has, among many other perceptive observations, noted the lack of
identity between originality and priority. See, for example, his early paper, "The
Problem of Originality in Science," American Journal of Psychology 39 (December
1927): pp. 70-90, esp. at p. 78.
43. F. Darwin, Charles Darwin, p. 54.
306
geance-that I should be forestalled .... I never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had my MS. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have
made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters .... So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed. 46
Humility and disinterestedness urge Darwin to give up his claim to priority; the wish for originality and recognition urges him that all need not
be lost. At first, with typical magnanimity, but without pretense of equanimity, he makes the desperate decision to step aside altogether. A week
later, he is writing Lyell again; perhaps he might publish a short version
of his long-standing text, "a dozen pages or so." And yet, he says in his
anguished letter, "I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably."
Tom by his mixed feelings, he concludes his letter, "My good dear friend,
forgive me. This is a trumpery letter, influenced by trumpery feelings."
And in an effort finally to purge himself of his feelings, he appends a postscript, "I will never trouble you or Hooker on the subject again. " 47
The next day he writes Lyell once more, this time to repudiate the postscript. Again, he registers his ambivalence: "It seems hard on me that I
should lose my priority of many years' standing, but I cannot feel at all
sure that this alters the justice of the case. First impressions are generally
right, and I at first thought it would be dishonourable in me now to
publish." 48
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
p. 452.
pp. 426-27.
p. 473.
pp. 474-75.
p. 475.
307
As fate would have it, Darwin is just then prostrated by the death of
his infant daughter. He manages to respond to the request of his friend
Hooker and sends the Wall ace manuscript and his own original sketch of
1844, "solely," he writes, "that you may see by your own handwriting
that you did read it .... Do not waste much time. It is miserable in me to
care at all about priority." 49
Other members of the scientific community do what the tormented Darwin will not do for himself. Lyell and Hooker take matters in hand and
arrange for that momentous session in which both papers are read at the
Linnean Society. And as they put it in their letter prefacing the publication
of the joint paper of "Messrs. C. Darwin and A. Wallace," "in adopting
our present course ... we have explained to him [Darwin] that we are not
solely considering the relative claims to priority of himself and his friend,
but the interests of science generally." 50 Despite this disclaimer of interest
in priority, be it noted that scientific knowledge is not the richer or the
poorer for having credit given where credit is due; it is the social institution
of science and individual men of science that would suffer from repeated
failures to allocate credit justly.
This historic and not merely historical episode so plainly exhibits the
ambivalence occasioned by the double concern with priority and modesty
that it need not be examined further. Had the institutionalized emphasis
on originality been alone in point, the claim to priority would have invited
neither self-blame nor self-contempt; publication of the long antecedent
work would have proclaimed its own originality. But the value of originality was joined with the value of humility and modesty. To insist on
priority would be to trumpet one's own excellence, but scientific peers and
friends of the discoverers, acting as a third party in accord with the institutional norms, could with full propriety announce the joint claims to
originality that the discoverers could not bring themselves to do. Underneath it all lies a deep and agitated ambivalence toward priority.
I have not yet counted the recorded cases of debates about priority in
science and the manner of their outcome. Such a count, moreover, will not
tell the full story, for it will not include the doubtless numerous instances
in which independent ideas and discoveries were never announced by those
who found their ideas anticipated in print. Nevertheless, I have the strong
impression that disputes, even bitter disputes, over priority outnumber the
cases of despondent but unreserved admission that the other fellow had
made the discovery first.
49. Ibid., p. 476.
50. "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties and on the Perpetuation of
Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection," by C. Darwin and A. R. Wallace. Communicated by Sir C. Lyell and J.D. Hooker, Journal of the Linnean Society
3 (1859): 45. Read 1 July 1858.
308
309
310
only with the aid of a dictionary), for these letters made it plain that
Pascal, not Newton, had, to the greater glory of France, first discovered
the law of gravitation, a momentous correction of history, which for several years excited the interest of the Academie des Sciences and usurped
many pages of the Comptes Rendus until, in 1869, Vrain-Lucas was finally
brought to book and sentenced to two years in prison. For our purposes,
it is altogether fitting that Vrain-Lucas should have had Pascal address this
maxim to the boy Newton: "Tout homme qui n'aspire pas a se jaire un
nom n'executera jamais rien de grand." 55
Such lavish forgery is unknown to science proper, but the pressure to
demonstrate the truth of a theory or to produce a sensational discovery
has occasionally led to the faking of scientific evidence. The biologist Paul
Kammerer produced specimens of spotted salamanders designed to prove
the Lamarckian thesis experimentally; was thereupon offered a chair at
the University of Moscow where in 1925 the Lamarckian views of Michurin held reign; and upon proof that the specimens were fakes, attributed
the fraud to a research assistant and committed suicide. 56 Most recently,
the Piltdown man-that is, the skull and jaw from which his existence was
inferred-has been shown, after forty years of uneasy acceptance, to be a
carefully contrived hoax. 57
Excessive concern with "success" in scientific work has on occasion
led to the types of fraud Babbage picturesquely described as "trimming"
and "cooking." The trimmer clips off "little bits here and there from observations which differ most in excess from the mean, and [sticks] ... them
on to those which are too small ... [for the unallowable purpose of] 'equitable adjustment.'" The cook makes "multitudes of observations" and
selects only those which agree with an hypothesis, and, as Babbage says,
"the cook must be very unlucky if he cannot pick out fifteen or twenty
55. The definitive reports on the Vrain-Lucas affair by M. P. Faugere and by
Henri Bordier and Mabille are not available to me at this telling; substantial details,
including extracts from the court proceedings, are given by the paleographer, Etienne
Charavay, Affair Vrain-Lucas: Etude Critique (Paris, 1870); a more accessible summary that does not, however, do full justice to the prodigious inventiveness of VrainLucas is provided by J. A. Farrer, Literary Forgeries (London: Longmans Green,
1907), chapter 12. The biographer of Newton, Sir David Brewster, at the age of 87,
did his share to safeguard the integrity of historical scholarship, but this did not
prevent Chasles from prizing the three thousand letters of Galileo which he had
acquired from his friend, although they happened to be in French, rather than in
the Latin or Italian in which Galileo wrote.
56. (Kammerer's suicide may not have resulted from this traumatic episode. See
the recent effort to vindicate Kammerer by Arthur Koestler, The Case of the Midwife
Toad [New York: Random House, 1972}.) Martin Gardner, In the Name of Science
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1952), p. 143; W. S. Beck, Modern Science and
the Nature of Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957), pp. 201-2; Conway Zirkle,
"The Citation of Fraudulent Data," Science 120 (30 July 1954): 189-90.
57. William L. Straus, Jr., "The Great Piltdown Hoax," Science 119 (26 February
1954): 265-69.
311
which will do for serving up." This eagerness to demonstrate a thesis can,
on occasion, lead even truth to be fed with cooked data, as it did for the
neurotic scientist, described by Lawrence Kubie, "who had proved his
case, but was so driven by his anxieties that he had to bolster an already
proven theorem by falsifying some quite unnecessary additional statistical
data." 58
The great cultural emphasis upon recognition for original discovery can
lead by gradations from these rare practices of outright fraud to more
frequent practices just beyond the edge of acceptability, sometimes without
the scientist's being aware that he has exceeded allowable limits. Scientists
may find themselves reporting only "successful experiments or results,
so-called, and neglecting to report 'failures.'" Alan Gregg, that informed
observer of the world of medical research, practice, and education, reports
the case of
the medical scientist of the greatest distinction who told me that during his
graduate fellowship at one of the great English universities he encountered for
the first time the idea that in scientific work one should be really honest in reporting the results of his experiments. Before that time he had always been
told and had quite naturally assumed that the point was to get his observations
and theories accepted by others, and published.59
Yet, these deviant practices should be seen in perspective. What evidence
there is suggests that they are extremely infrequent, and this temporary
focus upon them will surely not be distorted into regarding the exceptional
case as the typical. Apart from the moral integrity of scientists themselves
-and this is, of course, the major basis for honesty in science-there is
much in the social organization of science that provides a further compelling basis for honest work. Scientific research is typically, if not always,
under the exacting scrutiny of fellow experts, involving, as it usually though
not always does, the verifiability of results by others. Scientific inquiry is
in effect subject to rigorous policing, to a degree perhaps unparalleled in
any other field of human activity. Personal honesty is supported by the
public and testable character of science. As Babbage remarked, "the cook
would [at best] procure a temporary reputation ... at the expense of his
permanent fame."
Competition in the realm of science, intensified by the great emphasis
on original and significant discoveries, may occasionally generate incentives
for eclipsing rivals by illicit or dubious means. But this seldom occurs in
the form of preparing fraudulent data; instead, it appears in quite other
forms of deviant behavior involving spurious claims to discovery. More
58. Lawrence S. Kubie, "Some Unsolved Problems of the Scientific Career,"
American Scientist 41 (1953): 596-613; ibid. 42 (1954): 104-12.
59. Alan Gregg, Challenges to Contemporary Medicine (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1956), p. 115.
312
Deviant behavior most often takes the form of occasional plagiaries and
many slanderous charges or insinuations of plagiary. The historical record
shows relatively few cases (and of course the record may be defective) in
which one scientist actually pilfered another. We are assured that in the
Mecanique celeste (until then, outranked only by Newton's Principia) "theorems and formulae are appropriated wholesale without acknowledgement" by Laplace. 60 Or, to take a marginal case, Sir Everard Home, the
distinguished English surgeon who was appointed custodian of the unpublished papers of his even more distinguished brother-in-law, John Hunter,
published 116 papers of uncertain origin in the Philosophical Transactions
after Hunter's death, and burned Hunter's manuscripts, an action greatly
criticized by knowledgeable and suspicious contemporaries. 61 It is true
also that Robert Boyle, not impressed by the thought that theft of his ideas
might be a high tribute to his talent, was in 1688 driven to the desperate
expedient of printing "An advertisement about the loss of many of his
writings," later describing the theft of his work and reporting that he
would from then on write only on loose sheets, in the hope that these would
tempt thieves less than "bulky packets" and, going on to say that he was
resolved to send his writings to press without extensive revision in order
to avoid prolonged delays. 62 But even with such cases of larceny on the
60. As stated by the historian of astronomy, Agnes Mae Clerke, in her article on
Laplace in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some of Clerke's
further observations are much in point: "In the delicate task of apportioning his own
large share of merit, he certainly does not err on the side of modesty; but it would
perhaps be as difficult to produce an instance of injustice, as of generosity in his
estimate of ot.hers. Far more serious blame attaches to his all but total suppression
in the body of the work-and the fault pervades the whole of his writings-<> the
names of his predecessors and contemporaries . . . a production which may be
described as the organized result of a century of patient toil presents itself to the
world as the offspring of a single brain." And yet, since these matters are seldom all
of a piece, "Biot relates that, when he himself was beginning his career, Laplace
introduced him at the Institute for the purpose of explaining his supposed discovery
of equations of mixed differences, and afterwards showed him, under a strict pledge
of secrecy, the papers, then yellow with age, in which he had long before obtained
the same results" (vol. 16, pp. 201-2). As we shall see, Gauss, who was meticulous
in acknowledging predecessors, treated the young Bolyai as did Laplace the young
Biot.
61. Ralph H. Major, A History of Medicine (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publi.
cations, 1954), 2:703.
62. The account by A. M. Clerke in the article on Boyle in the Dictionary of
National Biography is somewhat mistaken in attributing charges of plagiary to the
313
314
315
of the Royal Society, packed the committee, helped direct its activities,
anonymously wrote the preface for the second published report-the draft
is in his handwriting-and included in that preface a disarming reference
to the old legal maxim that "no one is a proper witness for himself [and
that] he would be an iniquitous Judge, and would crush underfoot the laws
of all the people, who would admit anyone as a lawful witness in his own
cause." 70 We can gauge the immense pressures for self-vindication that
must have operated for such a man as Newton to have adopted these
means for defense of his valid claims. It was not because Newton was so
weak but because the institutionalized values were so strong that he was
driven to such lengths.
This interplay of offensive and defensive maneuvers-no doubt students
of the theory of games can recast it more rigorously-thus gives further
emphasis to priority. Scientists try to exonerate themselves in advance
from possible charges of filching by going to great lengths to establish their
priority of discovery. Often this kind of anticipatory defense produces the
very result it was designed to avoid by inviting others to show that prior
announcement or publication need not mean there was no plagiary.
The effort to safeguard priority and to have proof of one's integrity has
led to a variety of institutional arrangements designed to cope with this
strain on the system of rewards. In the seventeenth century, for example,
and even as late as the nineteenth, discoveries were sometimes reported in
the form of anagrams-as with Galileo's "triple star" of Saturn and
Hooke's law of tension-for the double purpose of establishing priority
of conception and of yet not putting rivals on to one's original ideas, until
they had been further worked out. 71 Then, as now, complex ideas were
quickly published in abstracts, as when Halley urged Newton to do so in
70. There is a sizeable library discussing the Newton-Leibniz controversy. I have
drawn chiefly upon More, Isaac Newton, who devotes the whole of chapter 15 to
this subject; Augustus de Morgan, Essays on the Life and Works of Newton (Chicago:
Open Court Pub. Co., 1914 ), esp. appendix 2; and Brewster, Memoirs of Newton,
chapter 22; cf. Cohen, Franklin and Newton, who is properly critical of the biography by More at various points (e.g., pp. 84-85). On the basis of his examination of
the Portsmouth Papers, More concludes that "the principals, and practically all those
associated with them wantonly made statements which were false; and not one of
them came through with a clean record" (p. 567). E. N. da C. Andrade has aptly
summed up Newton's ambivalence in this judgment: "Evidence can be cited for the
view that Newton was modest or most overweening; the truth is that he was a very
complex character . . . when not worried or irritated he was modest about his
achievements." See Andrade's Sir Isaac Newton (London: Collins, 1954 ), esp. pp.
131-32.
71. The earlier widespread use of anagrams is well known. As late as the nineteenth
century, the physicists Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait reintroduced this practice and
"to secure priority ... [took] the unusual step of publishing [their idea]! as an anagram in Nature some months before the publication of the book" (Sir J. J. Thomson, Recollections and Reflections [London: G. Bell, 193 6], p. 22) .
316
The large majority of scientists, like the large majority of artists, writers,
doctors, bankers and bookkeepers, have little prospect of great and decisive originality. For most of us artisans of research, getting things into
print becomes a symbolic equivalent to making a significant discovery.
Nor could science advance without the great unending flow of papers reporting careful investigations, even if these are routine rather than distinctly original. The indispensable reporting of research can, however,
become converted into an itch to publish that, in turn, becomes aggravated
by the tendency, in many academic institutions, to transform the sheer
number of publications into a ritualized measure of scientific or scholarly
accomplishment. 75
72. Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London (London: 175657), 4:437.
73. For a recent instance, see the episode described by Wiener in which the race
between Bouligand and Wiener to contribute new concepts "in potential theory"
ended in a "dead heat," since Bouligand had submitted his "results to the [French]
Academy in a sealed envelope, after a custom sanctioned by centuries of academy
tradition" (Wiener, I Am a Mathematician, p. 92).
74. J. Hettinger, "Problems of Scientific Property and Its Solution," Science Progress 26 (January 1932)., pp. 449-61; also the paper by Dr. A. I. Sotesi, of the New
York Academy of Medicine, cited by Bernhard J. Stern in Social Factors in Medical
Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927), p. 108.
75. There is not space here to examine the institutional conditions which lead the
piling up of publications to become a virtually ritualistic activity.
317
318
such instances, the scientist withdraws from the field of inquiry, either
by giving up science altogether or by confining himself to some alternative
role in it, such as teaching or administration. (This does not say, of course,
that teaching and administration do not have their own attractions, or that
they are less significant than inquiry; I refer here only to the scientists who
reluctantly abandon their research because it does not measure up to their
own standards of excellence.)
A few historical instances of such retreatism must stand in place of
more. The nineteenth-century physicist Waterston, his classic paper on
molecular velocity having been rejected by the Royal Society as "nothing
but nonsense," becomes hopelessly discouraged and leaves science altogether.79 Deeply disappointed by the lack of response to his historic papers
on heredity, Mendel refuses to publish the now permanently lost results of
his further research and, after. becoming abbot of his monastery, gives up
his research on heredity. 80 Robert Mayer, tormented by refusals to grant
him priority for the principle of conservation of energy, tries a suicide Map
from a third-story window and succeeds only in breaking his legs and
being straitjacketed, for a time, in an insane asylum. 81
Perhaps the most telling instance of retreatism in mathematics is that of
Janos Bolyai, inventor of one of the non-Euclidean geometries. The young
Bolyai tries to obey his mathematician-father who, out of the bitter fruits
of his own experience, warns his son to give up any effort to prove the
postulate on parallels-or, as his father more picturesquely put it, to
"detest it just as much as lewd intercourse; it can deprive you of all your
leisure, your health, your rest, and the whole happiness of your life." He
dutifully becomes an army officer instead, but his demon does not permit
the twenty-one-year-old Bolyai to leave the postulate alone. After years
of work, he develops his geometry, sends the manuscript to his father who
in tum transmits it to Gauss, the prince of mathematicians, for a magisterial opinion. Gauss sees in the work proof of authentic genius, writes
79. R. H. Murray, Science and Scientists in the Nineteenth Century (London:
Sheldon, 1925), pp. 346-48; and David L. Watson, Scientists are Human, (London:
Watts and Co., 1938), pp. 58, 80; Strutt, John William Strutt, pp. 169-71. Evidently,
Sidney Lee, the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography by the time it reached
the volume in which Waterston should have had an honored place, could not penetrate the obscurity into which the great discoverer was plunged by the unfounded
rejection of his work; there is no biography of Waterston in the DNB.
80. Hugo litis, Life of Mendel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932), pp. 111-12;
and see Mendel's prophetic remark, "My time will come" (Ibid., p. 282).
81. Mayer's having been rejected by his liberal friends who took part in the revolution of 1848, which he as a conservative opposed, may have contributed to his
disturbance. For some recent evidence on how Mayer's priority was safeguarded by
the lay-sociologist Josef Popper, see Otto Bllih, "The Value of Inspiration: A Study
on Julius Robert Mayer and Josef Popper-Lynkeus," Isis 43 (September 1952): 21120. Bllih's opinion that claims of priority in science are no longer taken seriously
seems exaggerated.
319
the elder Bolyai so, and adds, in all truth, that he cannot express his
enthusiasm as fully as he would like, for "to praise it, would be to praise
myself. Indeed, the whole contents of the work, the path taken by your son,
the results to which he is led, coincide almost entirely with my meditations,
which have occupied my mind partly for the last thirty or thirty-five years
... I am very glad that it is just the son of my old friend, who takes the
precedence of me in such a remarkable manner." Delighted by this accolade, the elder Bolyai sends the letter to his son, innocently saying that it
is "very satisfactory and redounds to the honor of our country and our
nation." Young Bolyai reads the letter, but has no eye for the statements
which say that his ideas are sound, that in the judgment of the incomparable Gauss he is blessed with genius. He sees only that Gauss has
anticipated him. For a time, he believes that his father must have previously
confided his ideas to Gauss who had thereupon made them his own. 82 His
priority lost, and, with the further blow, years later, of coming upon Lobachevsky's non-Euclidean geometry, he never again publishes any work in
mathematics. 83
Apart from historical cases of notable scientists retreating from the field
after denial of the recognition owing them, there are many contemporary
cases that come to the notice of psychiatrists rather than historians. Since
Lawrence Kubie is almost alone among psychiatrists to have described
82. The principal source on the Bolyais, including the germane correspondence, is
Paul Stackel, Wolfgang und Johann Bolyai, Geometrische Untersuchungen, 2 vols.
(Leipzig: 1913 ), which was not available to me at this writing. An excellent short
account is provided by Roberto Bonola, Non-Euclidean Geometry, trans. H. S. Carslaw, 2d rev. ed. (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1938), pp.
96-113; see also Dirk J. Struik, A Concise History of Mathematics (New York:
Dover Publications, 1948), 2:251-54; Franz Schmidt, "Lebensgeschichte des Ungarischen Mathematikers Johann Bolyai de Bolya," Abhandlungen zur Geschichte
der Mathematik 8 (1898): 135-46.
83. Two letters provide context for Bolyai's great fall from the high peak of exhilaration into the slough of despond. In 1823 he writes his father: " ... the goal is
not yet reached, but I have made such wonderful discoveries that I have been almost
overwhelmed by them, and it would be the cause of continual regret if they were
lost. When you will see them, you too will recognize it. In the meantime I can say
only this: I have created a new universe from nothing. All that I have sent you till
now is but a house of cards compared to the tower. I am as fully persuaded that it
will bring me honor, as if I had already completed the discovery." And just as, a
generation later, Lyell was prophetically to warn Darwin of being forestalled, so
does the elder Bolyai warn the younger: "If you have really succeeded in the question,
it is right that no time be lost in making it public, for two reasons: first, because
ideas pass easily from one to another, who can anticipate its publication; and secondly,
there is some truth in this, that many things have an epoch, in which they are found
at the same time in several places, just as the violets appear on every side in spring.
Also every scientific struggle is just a serious war, in which I cannot say when peace
will arrive. Thus we ought to conquer when we are able, since the advantage is always to the first comer." (Quoted by Bonola, Non-Euclidean Geometry, pp. 98, 99.)
Small wonder that though young Bolyai continued to work sporadically in mathematics, he never again published the results of his work.
320
these in print, I shall draw upon his pertinent account of the maladaptations of scientists suffering from an unquenched thirst for original discovery
and ensuing praise.
When the scientist's aspirations become too lofty to be realized, the
result sometimes is apathy, imbued with fantasy. In Kubie's words:
The young scientist may dwell for years in secret contemplation of his own
unspoken hope of making great scientific discoveries. As time goes on, his
silence begins to frighten him; and in the effort to master his fear, he may
build up a secret feeling that his very silence is august, and that once he is
ready to reveal his theories, they will shake the world. Thus a secret megalomania can hide among the ambitions of the young research worker. 84
Perhaps most stressful of all is the situation in which the recognition
accorded the scientist is not proportioned to his industry or even to the
merit of his work. He may find himself serving primarily to remove
obstacles to fundamental discoveries by others. His "negative experiments
clear the road for the steady advance of science, but at the same time they
clear the road for the more glamorous successes of other scientists, who
may have used no greater intelligence, skill or devotion; perhaps even
less." 85 Like other men, scientists become disturbed by the pan-human
problem of evil, in which "the fortunes of men seem to bear practically no
relation to their merits and efforts." 86
Kubie hazards some further observations that read almost as if they
were describing the behavior of delinquents in response to a condition of
relative anomie. "Success or failure, whether in specific investigations or
in an entire career may be almost accidental, with chance a major factor in
determining not what is discovered, but when and by whom .... Yet young
students are not warned that their future success may be determined by
forces which are outside their own creative capacity or their willingness
to work hard. " 87 As a result of all this, Kubie suspects the emergence of
84. Kubie, "Some Unsolved Problems of the Scientific Career," p. 110.
85. Ibid.
86. Gilbert Murray, quoted in a similar theoretical context by Merton, Social
Theory and Social Structure, p. 147.
87. Ibid., pp. 111-12. This reading of the case is not inconsistent with the facts
321
what he calls a "new psychosocial ailment among scientists which may not
be wholly unrelated to the gangster tradition of dead-end kids. Are we
witnessing the development of a generation of hardened, cynical, amoral,
embittered, disillusioned young scientists?"
Lacking the evidence, this had best be left as a rhetorical question. But
the import of the question needs comment. In "Social Structure and
Anomie," I have set out diagnoses of the ways in which a culture giving
emphasis to aspirations for all, aspirations which cannot be realized by
many, exerts a pressure for deviant behavior and for cynicism, for rejection of the reigning moralities and the rules of the game. We see
here the possibility that the same pressures may in some degree be at
work in the institution of science. But even though the pressures are
severe, they need not produce much deviant behavior. There are great
differences between the social structure of science and other social
structures in which deviance is frequent. Among other things, the institution of science continues to have an abiding emphasis on other values that
curb the culturally induced tendency toward deviation, an emphasis on
the value of truth by whomsoever it is found, and a commitment to the
disinterested pursuit of truth. Simply because we have focused on the
deviant behavior of scientists, we should not forget how relatively rare
this is. Only a few try to gain reputation by means that will lose them
repute.
Functions and Dysfunctions of Emphasis on Priority
It has sometimes been said that the emphasis upon recognition of
priority has the function of motivating scientists to make discoveries. For
example, Sir Frederick Banting, the major figure in the discovery of
insulin-therapy for diabetes, was long disturbed by the conviction that the
chief of his department had been given too much credit for what he had
contributed to the discovery. Time and again, Banting returned to the
importance of allocating due credit for a discovery: " ... it makes Research
men," he said. "It stimulates the individuality and develops personality.
Our religion, our moral fabric, our very basis of life are centered round
the idea of reward. It is not abnormal therefore that the Research man
should desire the kudos of his own work and his own idea. If this is taken
away from him, the greatest stimulant for work is withdrawn." 88
88. Quoted in Lloyd Stevenson, Sir Frederick Banting (London: Heinemann Medical Books, 1947), p. 301. Two hundred years before, John Morgan, the celebrated
founder of the first American medical school, had ~xpressed the same conception,
but in sociologically more acceptable terms. To his mind, personal motivation for
fame was linked with the social benefit of the advancement of science. Men of
science, he said, "have the highest motives that can animate the pursuits of a generous
322
323
all, neither under the laws of logic nor under the laws of any other realm,
must one become permanently wed to an hypothesis simply because one
has tentatively embraced it. But the interpretation does seem to account
for some of the otherwise puzzling aspects of conflicts over priority in
science, and it is closely bound to a body of sociological theory.
In short review, the interpretation is this: Like other social institutions,
the institution of science has its characteristic values, norms, and organization. Among these, the emphasis on the value of originality has a selfevident rationale, -for it is originality that does much to advance science.
Like other institutions also, science has its system of allocating rewards
for performance of roles. These rewards are largely honorific, since even
today, when science is largely professionalized, the pursuit of science is
culturally defined as being primarily a disinterested search for truth and
only secondarily a means of earning a livelihood. In line with the valueemphasis, rewards are to be meted out in accord with the measure of
accomplishment. When the institution operates effectively, the augmenting
of knowledge and the augmenting of personal fame go hand in hand;
the institutional goal and the personal reward are tied together. But
these institutional values have the defects of their qualities. The institution can get partly out of control, as the emphasis upon originality
and its recognition is stepped up. The more thoroughly scientists ascribe
an unlimited value to originality, the more they are in this sense dedicated
to the advancement of knowledge, the greater is their involvement in
the successful outcome of inquiry and their emotional vulnerability to
failure.
Against this cultural and social background, one can begin to glimpse
the sources, other than idiosyncratic ones, of the misbehavior of individual
scientists. The culture of science is, in this measure, pathogenic. It can lead
scientists to develop an extreme concern with recognition which is in turn
the validation by peers of the worth of their work. Contentiousness, selfassertive claims, secretiveness lest one be forestalled, reporting only the
data that support an hypothesis, false charges of plagiarism, even the occasional theft of ideas and, in rare cases, the fabrication of data,-all these
have appeared in the history of science and can. be thought of as deviant
behavior in response to a discrepancy between the enormous emphasis in
the culture of science upon original discovery and the actual difficulty
many scientists experience in making an original discovery. In this situation
of stress, all manner of adaptive behaviors are called into play, some of
these being far beyond the mores of science.
All this can be put more generally. We have heard much in recent years
about the dangers brought about by emphasis on the relativity of values,
about the precarious condition of a society in which men do not believe
in values deeply enough and do not feel strongly enough about what they
324
15
Behavior
Patterns of
Scientists
1968
The history of science indelibly records 1953 as the year in which the
structure of the DNA molecule was discovered. But it is 1968 that will
probably emerge as the year of the double helix in the history that treats
the behavior of scientists, for James Watson's deeply personal account of
that discovery, now in its ninth printing, has evidently seized the public
imagination. Widely and diversely reviewed in journals of science and
para-science, it has been discussed in scores of monthlies, weeklies, and
daily newspapers, from the London Times to the Erie, Pennsylvania,
Times, from the Village Voice to the Wall Street Journal (which, aptly
enough, manages to give a faintly financial slant to the book, concluding
that "Watson, in the long run, may have done science a favor. In these
days when the public is asked to allocate billions for scientific research,
it's of some comfort to know that the spenders are human.").
To judge from the popular reviews, that indeed was taken to be the
essential message of the book: scientists are human, after all. This phrasing,
it turns out, does not mean that scientists can be assigned at long last to
the species Homo sapiens. Many Americans and some Englishmen were
apparently prepared to entertain that serviceable hypothesis even before
the appearance of The Double Helix. Evidently, what is meant by the
Watson-induced thought that scientists too are human is that scientists are
all too human; that, in the succinct, jaundiced words of the St. Louis
Presented as the annual Phi Beta Kappa-Sigma Xi address before the American
Association for the Advancement of Science in December 1968. Copublished in
American Scientist 58 (Spring 1969): 1-23, and The American Scholar 38 (Spring
1969) : 197-225. This paper also contains passages from Robert K. Merton and
Richard Lewis, "The Competitive Pressures: ( 1) The Race for Priority," in Impact
of Science on Society 21, no. 2 (1971): 151-60, 1971 by UNESCO, reprinted by
permission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
326
327
There is a certain plausibility to this view that the mores of science and
the behavior of scientists must surely have changed in the recent past.
For plainly, all the basic demographic, social, economic, political, and
328
329
330
that fivefold independent discovery of the maser, along with Willis Lamb,
Joseph Weber, Nikolai Basov, and Aleksandr Prokhorov._
The contemporary annals of science are peppered with cases of scientists
spurred on to more intense effort by the knowledge that others were on
much the same track. Harriet Zuckerman's interviews with Nobel laureates
find many of them testifying, in the words of one of them, that "it was
bound to happen soon. Had I not done it, . . . it was there, waiting for
somebody ... [probably] at the Rockefeller Institute." Or to tum from the
moving frontiers of science to its interior regions, Warren Hagstrom found
that two-thirds of a sample of some fourteen hundred scientists had been
anticipated by others in their own contributions, a good number of these
on more than one occasion. And, if there were need of any further sign
that contemporary scientists are often engaged in the race for priority, we
need only turn to the periodic editorials by Samuel Goudsmit in the
Physical Review Letters, where he notes the drive for quick publication to
ensure priority, sometimes at the expense of physicists "working along the
same lines who want to do a more complete job before publishing their
findings." Some of his editorials are touched with anguish as he reviews
expedients adopted by physicists seeking publication in the Letters in order
to " 'scoop' a competitor who has already submitted a full article" or by
some who use the newspapers for the first announcement of their findings
or ideas.
Changes in the social structure of science appear to have counteracting
effects on this form of competition, some serving to intensify it, others to
dampen it. The exponential increase in the number of scientists has been
accompanied by more and more specialization in research, quite along the
lines of both Spencerian and Durkheimian theories of role differentiation.
Although the process of differentiation has reduced the numbers of those
engaged in direct competition for discovery in a given narrow field, it has
probably intensified rivalry by increasing awareness of the work going
forward elsewhere on the same problem. (The young Watson's candid
account of his abiding sense that the great Pauling might get there first
exemplifies this to the full.)
Various differences in the intellectual and social structure of scientific
specialties probably affect the extent and intensity of competition for
discovery within them. The various fields can be thought of as differing in
their "population density" of scientists. This refers not to the obvious
differences in the absolute numbers of scientists at work in this or that
discipline or specialty. Population density refers rather to the numbers
at work in relation to the significant problematics of the field, so that some
fields are more "crowded" than others in the sense that many workers are
focusing on the same problems.
331
332
333
identify them. But less consequential though useful contributions may now
be more often lost to view, and who is to assess the effects of this on the
advancement of science?
Under these circumstances, the concern with establishing priority of
conception may become deepened for large numbers of research scientists.
The threatened absence of a public identity in science may also heighten
the competition to publish in journals of high prestige where visibility is
greater than in the less-regarded and less widely read journals.
The public response to the Watson personal memoir seldom considered
that scientists vary greatly in their attitudes toward competition. Some revel
in it; others shun it. For some, it is stimulus; for others, annoyance or
threat. Some enjoy the tension of the race; others prefer the tranquility of
virtually no competition at all. Freud, for example, wrote nostalgically
about the early days of psychoanalysis when, thoroughly neglected, he
could enjoy a "splendid isolation" in which "there was nothing to hustle
me ... My publications, which I was able to place with a little trouble,
could always lag far behind my knowledge and could be postponed as long
as I pleased, since there was no doubtful 'priority' to be defended."
In the same vein, Jacques Hadamard reported that he was primarily
attracted by problems in mathematics that had been largely overlooked.
And he noted that "after having started a certain set of questions and
seeing that several other authors had begun to follow that same line, I . . .
[would] drop it and investigate something else."
So, too, Norbert Wiener, although he described himself as competitive,
nevertheless maintgined that he "did not like to watch the literature day by
day in order to be sure that neither Banach nor one of his Polish followers
had published some important result before me."
And, as a final instance, Max Planck described the initial lack of interest
among his colleagues in his work as an "outright boon," observing that "as
the significance of the concept of entropy had not yet come to be fully
appreciated, nobody paid any attention to the method adopted by me, and
I could work out my calculations completely at leisure, with absolute
thoroughness, without fear of interference or competition."
It may be these occasional domains of temporarily unpopular and unpopulated fields of inquiry that have given rise to the nostalgic and overly
generalized impression that competition in science is altogether peculiar to
our time.
In any case, there is evidence on every side that some unknown proportions of contemporary scientists are actively engaged in trying to get there
first. The fact is a commonplace. But does the fact warrant the inference,
drawn in the emerging mythology, that intense competition for discovery
is in a significant sense distinctive of the new era of science, with its enlarged population of scientists, its grants, prizes, and professional rewards?
334
335
336
337
last three centuries in the frequency with which multiples are an occasion
for intense priority conflicts. Perhaps the culture of science today is not
so pathogenic as it once was.
The absence of historical perspective marks another component of the
new mythology of science. This one holds that quick, if not premature,
publication to ensure priority is peculiar to our new breed of scientists,
as witness the manuscript that went off to the editors of Nature on that
fateful April 2nd of 1953. Again, it will do no harm to examine this opinion from a sociological and historical perspective. Today, as yesterday,
scientists are caught up in one of the many ambivalent precepts contained
in the institution of science. This one requires that the scientist must be
ready to make his newfound knowledge available to his peers as soon as
possible, but he must avoid an undue tendency to rush into print. (Compare Faraday's motto: "Work, Finish, Publish" with Ehrlich's "Viel arbeiten, wenig publizieren!") To see this in fitting historical context, we
must remember that the first scientific journals confronted not an excess
but a deficiency of manuscripts meriting publication. The problem did not
arise merely from the small number of men at work in science. There was
the further restraint that the value set upon the open disclosure of one's
scientific work was far from universally accepted.
From its very beginning, 1 the journal of science introduced the institutional device of quick publication to motivate men of science to replace
the value set upon secrecy with the value placed upon the open disclosure
of the knowledge they had created (a value that, in our own time, has
often acquired, through the displacement of goals, a spurious emphasis
on publication for its own sake, almost irrespective of the merit of what
is published). The concern with getting into print fast is scarcely confined
to contemporary science.
Watson fluttered the dovecotes of academia, to say nothing of the wider
reading public, by telling us of having joined with Crick in an enthusiastic
toast "to the Pauling failure ... Though the odds still appeared against us,
Linus had not yet won his Nobel." Once again, it seems, Watson had violated the mores that govern contest behavior in science and the public
disclosure of that behavior. Yet, as we have seen in the preceding chapter,
how mild and restrained is this episode by comparison with judgments on
contemporaries set out in public by great scientists of the heroic past. Although historical facts to the contrary are abundantly available, there
emerges a new mythology that treats competitive behavior of scientists as
peculiar to our own competitive age.
This introduces an instructive paradox. These, indeed, are changing
times in the ethos of science. But Watson's brash memoir does not testify
1. On this, see chapter 21 of this volume.
338
to a breakdown of once-prevailing norms that call for discreet and softspoken comment on scientific contemporaries. A memoir such as his would
have been regarded as a benign model of disciplined restraint by the turbulent scientific community of the seventeenth century. That it should have
created the stir it did testifies that, with the institutionalization of science,
the austere mores governing the public demeanor of scientists and the
public evaluation of contemporaries have become more exacting rather
than less. As a result, Watson's little book, so restrained in substance and
so mild in tone by comparison with the caustic and sometimes venomous
language of, say, Galileo or Newton, violates the sentiments of the many
oriented to these more exacting mores.
All of this brings us finally to the question touched off by the responses
of many scientists and laymen to the Watson memoir. We are perhaps
ready to see now that those responses relate to the long-standing denial
that through the centuries scientists, and often the greatest among them,
have been concerned with achieving and safeguarding their priority. The
question is, of course: what leads to this uneasiness about acknowledging
the drive for priority in science? Why the curious notion that a thirst for
significant originality and for having that originality accredited by competent colleagues is depraved-somewhat like a thirst for, say, bourbon and
7-Up? Or, in Freud's self-deprecatory words, that it is an "unworthy and
puerile" motive for doing science?
In one aspect, the embarrassed attitude of a Darwin or Freud toward
his own interest in priority is based upon the implicit assumption that behavior is actuated by a single motive, which can then be appraised as
good or bad, as noble or ignoble. It is assumed that the truly dedicated
scientist must be moved only by the concern with advancing knowledge.
As a result, deep interest in having his priority recognized is seen as marring his nobility of purpose as a man of science (although it might be
remembered that "noble" once meant the widely-known).
There is, moreover, a germ of psychological truth in the suspicion enveloping the drive for recognition in science. Any extrinsic reward-fame,
money, position-is morally ambiguous and potentially subversive of culturally esteemed values. For as rewards are meted out, they can displace
the original motive: concern with recognition can displace concern with
advancing knowledge. An excess of incentives can produce distracting
conftict.
In another aspect, the ambivalence toward priority means that scientists
reftect in themselves the ambivalence built into the social institution of
science itself. That ambivalence also derives from the mistaken belief that
concern with priority must express naked self-interest, that it is altogether
self-serving. On the surface, the hunger for recognition appears as mere
personal vanity, generated from within and craving satisfaction from with-
339
out. But when we reach deeper into the institutional complex that gives
added edge to that hunger, it turns out to be anything but personal, repeated as it is with slight variation by one scientist after another. Vanity,
so-called, is then seen as the outer face of the inner need for assurance
that one's work really matters, that one has measured up to the hard
standards maintained by at least some members of the community of scientists. Sometimes, of course, the desire for recognition is stepped up until
it gets out of hand. It becomes a driving lust for acclaim; megalomania
replaces the comfort of reassurance. But the extreme case need not be
taken for the modal one. In providing apt recognition for accomplishment,
the institution of science serves several functions, both for scientists and
for maintenance of the institution itself.
The community of science thus provides for the social validation of
scientific work. In this respect, it amplifies that famous opening line of
Aristotle's Metaphysics: "All men by nature desire to know." Perhaps,
but men of science by culture desire to know that what they know is really
so. The organization of science operates as a system of institutionalized
vigilance, involving competitive cooperation. It affords both commitment
and reward for finding where others have erred or have stopped before
tracking down the implications of their results or have passed over in their
work what is there to be seen by the fresh eye of another. In such a system,
scientists are at the ready to pick apart and appraise each new claim to
knowledge. This unending exchange of critical judgment, of praise and
punishment, is developed in science to a degree that makes the monitoring
of children's behavior by their parents seem little more than child's play.
Only after the originality and consequence of his work have been attested
by significant others can the scientist feel reasonably confident about it.
Deeply felt praise for work well done, moreover, exalts donor and recipient
alike; it joins them both in symbolizing the common enterprise. That, in
part, expresses the character of competitive cooperation in science.
The function of reassurance by recognition has a dependable basis in
the social aspects of knowledge. Few scientists have great certainty about
the worth of their work. Even that psychological stalwart, T. H. Huxley,
seemingly the acme of self-confidence, tells in his diary what it meant to
him to be elected to the Royal Society at the age of twenty-six, by far the
youngest in his cohort. It provided him, above all, with much needed reassurance that he was on the right track; in his own language, "acknowledgement of the value of what" he had done. And since, like the rest of
us, Huxley was occasionally inclined to doubt his own capacities and to
think himself a fool, he concluded that "the only use of honours is as an
antidote to such fits of 'the blue devils.' " When he later learned that he was
within an ace of receiving the Royal Medal of the Society-he did get it
the next year-he went on to say:
340
What I care for is the justification which the being marked in this position
gives to the course I have taken. Obstinate and self-willed as I am, ... there
are times when grave doubts overshadow my mind, and then such testimony as
this restores my self-confidence.
The drive for priority is in part an effort to reassure oneself of a capacity for original thought. Thus, rather than being mutually exclusive, as the
new mythology of science would have it, joy in discovery and the quest
for recognition by scientific peers are stamped out of the same psychological coin. In their conjoint ways, they both express a basic commitment
to the value of advancing knowledge.
But authentic reassurance can be provided only by the scientists whose
judgment one in tum respects. As we sociologists like to put it, we each
have our reference groups and individuals, whose opinions of our performance matter. Our peers and superiors in the hierarchy of accomplishment
become the significant judges for us. Darwin writing Huxley about the
Origin of Species "with awful misgivings" thought that "perhaps I had
deluded myself like so many have done, and I then fixed in my mind three
judges, on whose decision I determined mentally to abide. The judges
were Lyell, Hooker, and yourself." In this, Darwin was replicating the
behavior of many another scientist, both before and after him. The astronomer John Flamsteed, before his vendetta with Newton, wrote that "I
study not for present applause. Mr. Newton's approbation is more to me
than the cry of all the ignorant in the world." In almost the same language,
Schrodinger writes Einstein that "your approval and Planck's mean more
to me than that of half the world." And a Leo Szilard or a Max Delbriick,
widely known as exceedingly tough-minded and demanding judges who, all
uncompromising, will not relax their standards of judgment even to provide
momentary comfort to their associates, are reference figures whose plaudits
for work accomplished have a multiplier effect, influencing in tum the
judgments of many another scientist.
Other strategic facts show the inadequacy of treating an interest in recognition of scientific work as merely an expression of egotism. Very often,
the discoverers themselves take no part in arguing their claims to the priority or significance of their contributions. Instead, their friends or other
more detached scientists see the assignment of priority as a moral issue
not to be scanted. For them the assigning of all credit due is a functional
requirement for the institution of science itself. After all, to protect the
priority of another is only to act in accord with the norm, which has been
gathering force since the time of Francis Bacon, that requires scientists to
acknowledge their indebtedness to the antecedent work of others. As
Kapitza says of his master, "If anybody in publishing his work forgot to
mention that the given idea was not his own, Rutherford immediately ob-
341
jected. He saw to it in every possible way that ... true priority be maintained." Or, to take perhaps the most momentous instance in our day,
there is Niels Bohr, agitated by the thought that Meitner and Frisch, and
for that matter, Hahn and Strassmann too, might have their priority in the
splitting of the atom lost to view in the avalanche of publicity given the
Columbia University experiments, going to immense pains to set the record
straight (just as he was later to devote himself to the task of getting governments, and physicists too, to consider the human consequences of nuclear weapons).
Chargaff is correct, I believe, in suggesting that the Watson memoir
"may contribute to the much-needed demythologizing of modern science."
But as I have tried to suggest, to put the accent on "modern science" is
only to displace the old myth with a new variant. In noting this, I am
scarcely alone. Some practicing scientists, both before and after The Double
Helix, have put aside the myth that competition for originality in science
is alien to joy in discovery and that the drive for recognition should occasion self-contempt. Hans Selye asks his peers: "Why is everybody so
anxious to deny that he works for recognition? ... All the scientists I know
sufficiently well to judge (and I include myself in this group) are extremely
anxious to have their work recognized and approved by others. Is it not
below the dignity of an objective scientific mind to permit such a distortion
of his true motives? Besides, what is there to be ashamed of?" And, as
though he were responding to this rhetorical question, P. B. Medawar goes
on to argue: "In my opinion the idea that a scientist ought to be indifferent to matters of priority is simply humbug. Scientists are entitled to be
proud of their accomplishments, and what accomplishments can they call
'theirs' except the things they have done or thought of first? People who
criticize scientists for wanting to enjoy the satisfaction of intellectual ownership are confusing possessiveness with pride of possession." Himself an
inveterate observer of human behavior rather than only of economic numbers, Paul Samuelson also distinguishes cleanly the gold of scientific fame
from the brass of popular celebrity. This is how he concludes his presidential address to fellow economists:
Not for us is the limelight and the applause. But that doesn't mean the game
is not worth the candle or that we do not in the end win the game. In the long
run, the economic scholar works for the only coin worth having-our own
applause.
At a time when scientists and humanists search for common understandings, it is only fitting that the practicing scientist and the practicing poet
should both have perceived the deeper implications of the thrust for significant and acknowledged originality in living science. With the poet's
inward eye, Robert Frost puts it so:
342
The history of science declares what the poet sings: a care for truth
signifies a care for the truth-seeker.
2. From one version of the poem "Kitty Hawk" by Robert Frost, which first
appeared in the Atlantic. Copyright 1957 by Estate of Robert Frost. Reprinted by
permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.
16
Singletons
and
Multiples in
Science
1961
344
345
amplified by the thoroughgoing Baconian, Robert Boyle, in the first essay of part 1
of Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural! Philosophy, Propos'd in Familiar Discourses to a Friend, by Way of Invitation to the Study
of It (Oxford, 1663).
346
these and related matters, far from belittling the scientists of genius who
have done so much to shape the development of science, I shall only be
trying to fathom their distinctive and complex role in that development.
Perhaps the precept of Bacon will help us find in these matters seemingly
incidental to the work of scientists, "excellent light and information."
After having provided us with an attitude proper to a commemorative
occasion such as this one by urging us to take up and develop the force of
what the memorialized man has said rather than merely to repeat his
words; after having given us a charter for the human sciences in general
and having set out a useful though in the end temporary division between
the primarily psychological sciences that center on "man segregate" and
the primarily social sciences that center on "man congregate"; after having
urged us to examine what men do and not merely what they ought to do;
and after having warned us, at our peril, not to exclude the apparently
mean or trivial from the scope of investigation-after he has done all this,
as though it were still not enough, Francis Bacon makes my lot here an
easy as well as a pleasant one by practically providing a composite text
dealing with the particular subject I wish to examine: the import of a
methodical investigation of singleton and multiple discoveries in science
for our understanding of how science develops.
Instructed by the ideas that have been developed after Bacon's time, we
can piece together from his fragmentary but instructive observations, the
prime ingredients of a theory of the social processes making for discovery
and invention. I say "piece together" because these ingredients are not to
be found in any one place in Bacon's writings, neatly and coherently tied
up in a single bundle. In part, my reconstruction is deliberate anachronism.
But in part also, it is not so much reading into Bacon as reading him
entire to gain a sense of how he conceived scientific discoveries to come
about.
To begin with, Bacon wholly rejected the notion that in the new science,
discoveries would typically appear at random, dropping down from heaven
through the agency of star-touched genius. Instead, he declares that once
the right path is followed, discoveries in limitless number will arise from
the growing stock of knowledge: it is a process of once fitful and now
steady increments in knowledge. This notion of what we should today
describe as the accumulative cultural base on which science builds became
one of the many Baconian ideas taken up in abundance by his sometimes
overly enthusiastic disciples at midcentury. Consider only one of the more
devoted of these, John Webster, who in 1654 could pleasurably refer to
"our learned Country-man the Lord Bacon" as having made it clear that
"every age and generation, proceeding in the same way, and upon the
same principles, may dayly go on with the work, to the building up of a
347
well-grounded and lasting Fabrick, which indeed is the only true way for
the instauration and advancement of learning and knowledge." 6
Second, Bacon holds that the individual man of science pursuing his
daily labors entirely alone would at best produce small change. As he
announces in the N ovum Organum, "the path of science is not, like that of
philosophy, such that only one man can tread it at a time." Consider, he
says, "what may be expected from men abounding in leisure"-it would
be too much to ask Bacon to foresee the excessively busy life of so many
present-day scientists-"and working in association with one another, generation after generation. . . . Men will begin to understand their own
strength only when, instead of many of them doing the same things, one
shall take charge of one thing and one of another." 7 This theme, too, was
repeatedly picked up in the seventeenth century, not least by the first
historian of the Royal Society, "fat Tom Sprat," who, happily echoing
Bacon, could proclaim that "single labours" in science are not enough to
advance science significantly; rather, that it requires the "joynt labours of
many," even to the extreme of "joyning them into Committees (if we may
use that word in a Philosophical sence, and so in some measure purge it
from the ill sound, which it formerly had). " 8 And still in the Baconian
vein, Bishop Sprat notes that social interaction among men of science
facilitates originality of conception; or as he puts it less austerely, "In
Assemblies, the Wits of most men are sharper, their Apprehensions readier,
their Thoughts fuller, than in their Closets." 9
Having formulated two prerequisites for the advancement of sciencethe accumulating cultural base and the concerted efforts of men of science
sharpening their ideas through social interaction-Bacon returns, time and
again, to a third component in the social process of discovery. He tells
how his proposed methods of scientific inquiry reduce the significance of
the undeniably different capacities of men. You will recall the ringing
passage in the Novum Organum to this effect:
... the course I propose for discovery of sciences is such as leaves but little
to the acuteness and strength of wits, but places all wits and understandings
6. John Webster, Academiarum Examen; or, the Examination of Academies . . .
Offered to the Judgment of All Those that Love the Proficiencie of Arts and Science,
and the Advancement of Learning (London, 1654 ), p. 105. Appropriately enough,
the book is dedicated to Bacon.
7. Novum Organum, bk. 1, aphorism 113. I take here the instructed translation by
Benjamin Farrington, rather than that by Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, or even that by
Fowler. See Farrington, Francis Bacon (New York: Henry Schuman, 1949), p. 112.
8. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London, for the Improving
of Natural Knowledge, [hereafter cited as History] (London, 1667), p. 85. The same
point of science advancing through the "joynt force of many men" or the "united
Labors of many" recurs throughout the History; e.g., pp. 39, 91, 102, 341.
9. Ibid., p. 98.
348
349
theorist. Solomon's House makes room also for the advanced students, the
"novices and apprentices" in order that the "succession of the former
employed men not fail. " 11
Evidently, then, Bacon does not put all men of science on a single plane,
nor does he foolishly regard them as altogether interchangeable. Rather, he
emphasizes his belief that methodical procedures make for greater reliability in the work of science. Once a scientific problem has been defined,
profound individual differences among scientists will aff~t the likelihood
of reaching a solution, but the scale of differences in outcome is reduced
by the established procedures of scientific work. Only in this sense and to
this degree, does the new science, in the Baconian image, place "all wits
and understanding nearly on a level."
To the three components of his implicit social theory of discovery-the
incremental accumulation of knowledge, the sustained social interaction
between men of science and the methodical use of procedures of inquiryBacon adds a fourth and even more famous one. All innovations, social or
scientific, "are the births of time." 12 "Time is the greatest innovator." He
employs the same instructive metaphor to describe both his own work and
that of others, as when he accounts his own part in advancing knowledge
"a birth of time rather than of wit." 13 Once the needed antecedent conditions obtain, discoveries are offshoots of their time, rather than turning up
altogether at random.
To say that discoveries occur when their time has come is to say that
they occur only under identifiable requisite conditions. But, of course, these
conditions do not always obtain. In the past, says Bacon, inventions and
discoveries have made their appearance sporadically, almost accidentally.
This is so because there did not then exist the conditions of cumulative
knowledge, the association of men of science and the methodical, composite use of empirical and reasoned inquiry. With the new science, all this
will change. There are secrets of nature
... lying entirely out of the beat of the imagination, which have not yet been
found out. They too no doubt will some time or other, in the course and
revolution of many ages, come to light of themselves just as the others did;
only by the method of which we are now treating, they can be speedily and
suddenly and simultaneously presented and anticipated.14
With the increment in this passage, Bacon almost but not quite achieves
a sociological conception of the development of science.
To round this out, he need only add the further component that if
11.
12.
13.
14.
in Works.
160.
1, aphorism 122.
1, aphorism 109.
350
discoveries are "a birth of time," they will be effected by more than one
discoverer. Never saying this in so many words, Bacon nevertheless
intimates it-and more than once. By paraphrasing his language, I anachronize his idea, yet without doing violence to it. What he all but says is
that multiple independent discoveries do occur but not nearly so often as
people suppose. The erroneous supposal is made both by those who
mistakenly identify their own ideas as ancient ones and by others who
claim to find in the actually new what is ostensibly old. This is how Bacon
puts it:
That of those that have entered into search, some having fallen upon some
conceits [i.e., notions] which they after consider to be the same which they have
found in former authors, have suddenly taken a persuasion that a man shall but
with much labour incur and light upon the same inventions which he might
with ease receive from others; and that it is but a vanity and self-pleasing of the
wit to go about again, as one that would rather have a flower of his own
gathering, than much better gathered to his hand. That the same humour of
sloth and diffidence suggesteth that a man shall but revive some ancient opinion,
which was long ago propounded, examined, and rejected. And that it is easy
to err in conceit [the view] that a man's observation or notion is the same with
a former opinion, both because new conceits [notions] must of necessity be
uttered in old words, and because upon true and erroneous ground men may
meet in consequence or conclusion, as several lines or circles that cut in some
one point.l 5
351
gence of ideas. In effect, both adumbrationism and the full denial of rediscovery are faulty doctrines; the truth is, in this reconstructed judgment of
Bacon, that rediscovery occurs but not as often as the adumbrationists
suppose.
Now I am not saying, of course, that Bacon formulated a coherent
sociological theory of the composite elements making for discovery in
science. That would be adumbrationism with a vengeance. I recognize that
I have pieced together his intimations of such a theory from observations
scattered through the works he wrote over a span of two decades. But
with the advantage of historical hindsight, and of the ideas that were
formulated later, we can identify the ingredients of such a theory in Bacon.
He himself did not see the connections between them. Or, if he saw them,
he never recorded them in a form that has come down to us. What is of
interest, rather, is that these ingredients should have appeared more than
three centuries ago and that many men over a long period of time should
have come upon them anew and that they should have begun to compose
them into the beginnings of a sociological theory of scientific discovery. 19
19. Bacon had much else to say that qualifies him as a harbinger of the sociology
of science; I cannot deal with these matters here. But at least two sets of observations
can be segregated here below to intimate the broad scope of his understanding. First,
he notes the problem of the relations between the social structure and the character of
knowledge: "Of the impediments which have been in the nature of society and the
policies of state. That there is no composition of estate or society, nor order or quality
of persons, which have not some point of contrariety towards true knowledge. That
monarchies incline wits to profit and pleasure, and commonwealths to glory and
vanity. That universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation, cloisters to fables
and unprofitable subtilty, study at large to variety; and that it is hard to say, whether
mixture of contemplations with an active life, or retiring wholly to contemplations,
do disable and hinder the mind more" (Valerius Terminus, in Works, 6: 76). Thus
we must acknowledge that he sees the problem of the relations between types of
social structure and types of intellectual work, whatever we might think of his hypotheses. And second, he identifies all manner of social considerations that affect the
ways in which men of science and learning ordinarily record what they have learned
(with the intimation, perhaps, that this sorry variation will have to be sufficiently
standardized if the institution of science is to advance knowledge, rather than to congeal it): "... as knowledges have hitherto been delivered, there is a kind of contract
of error between the deliverer and the receiver; for he who delivers knowledge desires
to deliver it in such form as may be best believed, and not as may be most conveniently examined; and he who receives knowledge desires present satisfaction, without
waiting for due inquiry; and so rather not to doubt, than not to err; glory making the
deliverer careful not to lay open his weakness, and sloth making the receiver unwilling
to try his strength. But knowledge that is delivered to others as a thread to be spun
on ought to be insinuated (if it were possible) in the same method wherein it was
originally invented. And this indeed is possible in knowledge gained by induction; but
in this same anticipated and premature knowledge (which is in use) a man cannot
easily say how he came to the knowledge which he has obtained. Yet certainly it is
possible for a man in a greater or less degree to revisit his own knowledge, and trace
over again the footsteps both of his cognition and his consent; and by that means to
transplant it into another mind just as it grew in his own" (De Augmentis, in Works,
9: 122-23; see also pp. 16-18; Valerius Terminus, in Works, 6: 70-71).
352
In all this, Bacon had taken hold of a salient truth: the course of
scientific development cannot be understood as the work of man segregate.
But he exaggerated when he went on to the claim, which remains extravagant even when construed as he evidently intended it, that the new
method of science would "level men's wits and leave but little to individual
excellence." In this gratuitous overstatement he is not alone. For in the
centuries since Bacon, scores of observers have repeatedly stated the matter
in much the same disjunctive terms: shall we regard the course of science
and technology as a continuing process of cumulative growth, with discoveries tending to come in their due time, or as the work of men of genius
who, .with their ancillaries, bring about basic advances in science? In the
ordinary way, these are put as alternatives: either the social theory of
discovery or the "heroic" theory. What Bacon sensed, others glimpsed a
little more fully, without questioning the assumed opposition of these
theories of discovery. And so for more than three centuries, there has been
an intermittent mock battle between the advocates of the heroic theory
and the theory of the social determination of discovery in science. In this
conflict, truth has often been the major casualty. For want of an alternative
theory, we have been condemned to repeat the false disjunction between
the heroic theory centered on men of genius and the sociological theory
centered on the social determination of scientific discovery.
The Self-Exemplifying Hypothesis of Multiples
At the root of a sociological theory of the development of science is the
strategic fact of the multiple and independent appearance of the same
scientific discovery-what I shall, for convenience, hereafter describe as a
multiple. Ever since 1922 American sociologists have properly associated
the theory with William F. Ogburn and Dorothy S. Thomas, who did so
much to establish it in sociological thought. 20 On the basis of their compilation of some 150 cases of independent discovery and invention, they
concluded that the innovations became virtually inevitable as certain kinds
of knowledge accumulated in the cultural heritage and as social developments directed the attention of investigators to particular problems.
Appropriately enough, this is an hypothesis confirmed by its own history.
(Almost, as we shall see, it is a Shakespearean play within a play.) For
this idea of the sociological significance of multiple independent discoveries and inventions has been periodically rediscovered over a span of
centuries. Today I shall not reach back of the nineteenth century for
20. W. F. Ogburn and D. S. Thomas, "Are Inventions Inevitable?" Political Science Quarterly 37 (March 1922): 83-98; W. F. Ogburn, Social Change (New York:
Heubsch, 1922), pp. 90--122. On the same point, see chapters 10 and 17 of this
volume.
353
cases. Let us begin, then, with 1828, when Macaulay, in his essay on
Dryden, observes that the independent invention of the calculus by Newton
and Leibniz belongs to a larger class of instances in which the same invention or discovery had been made by scientists working apart from one
another. For example, Macaulay tells us that
the doctrine of rent, now universally received by political economists, was
propounded, at almost the same moment, by two writers unconnected with each
other. Preceding speculators had long been blundering round about it; and it
could not possibly have been missed much longer by the most heedless inquirer.
And then he concludes, in truly Macaulayan prose and with the unmistakable Macaulayan flair:
We are inclined to think that, with respect to every great addition which has
been made to the stock of human knowledge, the case has been similar: that
without Copernicus we should have been Copernicans-that without Columbus
America would have been discovered-that without Locke we should have
possessed a just theory of the origin of human ideas.21
This is not the time to examine in detail the many occasions on which
the fact of multiples with its implications for a theory of scientific development has been noted; on the evidence, often independently noted and set
down in print. Working scientists, historians and sociologists of science,
biographers, inventors, lawyers, engineers, anthropologists, Marxists and
anti-Marxists, Comteans and anti-Comteans have time and again, though
with varying degrees of perceptiveness, called attention both to the fact of
multiples and to some of its implications. But perhaps a partial listing will
bring out the diversity of occasions on which the fact and associated
hypothesis of independent multiples in science and technology were themselves independently set forth:
In 1828-as I have said, there was Macaulay, notably in his essay on
Dryden;
1835-Auguste Comte, in his Positive Philosophy;
1846, 1847, and 1848-the mathematician and logician, Augustus de
Morgan;
1855-Sir David Brewster, the physicist, editor of the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and warmly appreciative though not always discriminating
biographer of Newton, who was himself involved in several multiples
in dioptrics with Malus and Fresnel;
1862-1864-when there was printed an entire cluster of observations
upon multiples, growing out of the then-current controversy in
England over the patent system, such that the London Times ran
21. Miscellaneous Works of Lord Macaulay, ed. Lady Trevelyan (New York:
354
355
The limits of time have required me to confine this partial list to the
nineteenth century and the early twentieth. But this self-set rule must be
breached at least once. For on this occasion, we can scarcely exclude the
observations on the subject made by the chief founder of both the American Philosophical Society and the University of Pennsylvania. Of Franklin's several versions of the matter, I select one that bears his unmistakable
imprint. Writing to the Abbe de la Roche, he remarks:
I have often noted, in reading the works of M. Helvetius, that, though we
were born and brought up in two countries so remote from each other, we
have often hit upon the same thoughts; and it is a reflection very flattering to
me that we have loved the same studies and, so far as we have known them, the
same friends, and the same woman.22
356
Other scholars tacitly assume that the pattern of multiples is both curious
and distinctive of their own field of inquiry, if not entirely confined to it.
As one example, consider the observation by the notable historian of
geometry, Julian Lowell Coolidge:
It is a curious fact in the history of mathematics that discoveries of the
greatest importance were made simultaneously by different men of genius. 24
357
358
known. Far from being exceptions, Cavendish and Gauss are instances of
a larger class.
What holds for unpublished work often holds also for work which,
though published, proved relatively neglected or inaccessible, owing either
to its being at odds with prevailing conceptions, or its difficulty of apprehension, or its having been printed in little-known journals, and so on.
Here, again, singletons become redefined as multiples when the earlier
work is belatedly identified. In this class of cases, to choose among the
most familiar, we need only recall Mendel and Gibbs. The case of
Mende!28 is too well known to need review; that of Gibbs almost as
familiar, since Ostwald, in his preface to the German edition of the Studies
in Thermodynamics, remarked, in effect, that "it is easier to re-discover
Gibbs than to read him." 29
These are all cases of seeming singletons which then tum out to have
been multiples or rediscoveries. Other, more compelling, classes of evidence
bear upon the apparently incorrigible hypothesis that singletons, rather
than multiples, are the exception requiring distinctive explanation and that
discoveries in science are, in principle, potential multiples. These next
classes of evidence are all types of forestalled multiples, discoveries that
are historically identified as singletons only because the public report of
the discovery forestalled others from making it independently. These are
the cases of which it can be said: There, but for the grace of swift diffusion,
goes a multiple. 30
Second, then, and in every one of the sciences, including the social
sciences, there are reports in print stating that a scientist has discontinued
an inquiry, well along toward completion, because a new publication has
anticipated both his hypothesis and the design of inquiry into the hypothesis. The frequency of such instances cannot be firmly estimated, of course,
but I can report having located many.
Third, and closely akin to the foregoing type, are the cases in which the
scientist, though he is forestalled, goes ahead to report his original, albeit
anticipated, work. We can all call to mind those countless footnotes in the
literature of science that announce with chagrin: "Since completing this
experiment, I find that Woodworth (or Bell or Minot, as the case may be)
had arrived at this conclusion last year and that Jones did so fully sixty
years ago." No doubt many of us here today have experienced one or more
28. See Hugo litis, Life of Mendel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932); Conway
Zirkle, "Gregor Mendel and His Precursors," Isis 42 (June 1951): 97-104.
29. This is the entirely apt paraphrase by Muriel Rukeyser in Willard Gibbs (New
York: Doubleday Doran, 1942), 4: 314.
30. It is only appropriate that the original saying-"There, but for the grace of
God, . . ."-should itself be, with minor variations, a repeatedly reinvented expression.
359
of these episodes in which we find that our best and, strictly speaking, our
most original inquiries have been anticipated. On this assumption, I single
out only one case in point:
The experience of Lord Kelvin as an undergraduate of 18, when he was still
the untitled William Thomson, who sent his first paper on mathematics to the
Cambridge Journal only to find that he "had been anticipated by M. Chasles,
the eminent French geometrician in two points . . . [and] when the paper
appeared some months later, prefixed a reference to M. Chasles' memoirs,
and to another similar memoir by M. Sturm. Still later, Thomson discovered
that the same theorems had been also stated and proved by Gauss; and, after
all this, he found that these theorems had been discovered and fully published
more than ten years previously by Green, whose scarce work he never saw
till 1845." 31
Far from being rare, these voyages of subsequent and repeated discovery
of an entire array of multiples are frequent enough to be routine.
Fourth, these publicly recorded instances of forestalled multiples do not,
of course, begin to exhaust the presumably great, perhaps vast, number
of unrecorded instances. Many scientists cannot bring themselves to report
in print that they were forestalled. These cases are ordinarily known only
to a limited circle, closely familiar with the work of the forestalled
scientists. Interview studies of communication among scientists have begun
to identify the frequency of such ordinarily unknown forestalling of
multiples. Systematic field studies of this kind have turned up large proportions of what is often described as "unnecessary duplication" in research
resulting from imperfections in the channels of communication between
contemporary scientists. One such study32 of American and Canadian
mathematicians, for example, found 31 percent of the more productive
mathematicians reporting that delayed publication of the work of others
had resulted in such "needless duplication," that is, in multiples.
Fifth, we find seeming singletons repeatedly turning out to be multiples,
as friends, enemies, co-workers, teachers, students, and casual scientific
acquaintances have reluctantly or avidly performed the service of a candid
friend by acquainting an elated scientist with the fact that his original
finding or idea is not the singleton he had every reason to suppose it to
31. Silvanus P. Thompson, The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs
(London: Macmillan, 1910), 1: 44-45.
32. See Herbert Menzel, Review of Studies in the Flow of Information Among Scientists, Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research, a report prepared for
the National Science Foundation (January 1960), 1: 21, 2: 48. Much other apposite
information summarized in the Menzel monograph cannot be crowded into this paper.
It should be added, however, that these data were uncovered in studies that were not
focused on the matter of multiple and singleton discoveries; judging from the personal
reports of previously undisclosed multiples that spontaneously came my way after I
had published another paper on this general subject, I should judge that these occur
on a scale so large that it has scarcely begun to be appreciated.
360
be, but rather a doubleton or larger multiple, with the result that this latest
independent version of the discovery never found its way into print. So, the
young W. R. Hamilton hits upon and develops an idea in optics and as
he plaintively describes the episode:
A fortnight ago I believed that no writer had ever treated of Optics on a
similar plan. But within that period, my tutor, the Reverend Mr. Boyton, has
shown me in the College Library a beautiful memoir of Malus on the subject.
. . . With respect to those results which are common to both, it is proper to
state that I have arrived at them in my own researches before I was aware of
his. 33
What his tutor did for Hamilton, others have done for innumerable
scientists through the years. The diaries, letters, and memoirs of scientists
are crowded with cases of this pattern (and with accounts of how they
variously responded to these carriers of bad news).
Sixth, the pattern of forestalled multiples emerges as part of the oral
tradition rather than the written one in still another form: as part of lectures.
Here again, one instance must stand for many. Consider only the famous
lectures of Kelvin at the Johns Hopkins where, it is recorded, he enjoyed
"the surprise of finding [from members of his audience] that some of the
things he was newly discovering for himself had already been discovered
and published by others."34
A seventh type of pattern, tending to convert potential multiples into
singletons, so far as the formal historical record goes, occurs when
scientists have been diverted from a clearly developed program of investigation which, from all indications, was pointed in the direction successfully
taken up by others. It is, of course, conjecture that the discoveries actually
made by others would in fact have been made by the first but diverted
investigator. But consider how such a scientist as Sir Ronald Ross, persuaded that his discoveries of the malarial parasite and the host mosquito
were only the beginning, reports his conviction that, but for the interference with his plan by the authorities who employed him, he would have
gone on to the discoveries made by others:
The great treasure-house had been opened, but I was dragged away before
I could handle the treasures. Scores of beautiful researches now lay open to
me. I should have followed the "vermicule" in the mosquito's stomach-that
was left to Robert Koch. I intended to mix the "germinal threads" with birds'
33. Robert Perceval Graves, Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, 3 vols. (Dublin:
Hodges, Figgis, 1882), 1: 177.
34. Thompson, William Thomson, 2: 815-16. Kelvin tells of one such episode,
thus: "I was thinking about this three days ago, and said to myself, 'There must be
bright lines of reflexion from bodies in which we have those molecules that can produce intense absorption.' Speaking about this to Lord Rayleigh at breakfast, he informed me of this paper of Stokes's, and I looked and saw that what I had thought
of was there. It was perfectly well known, but the molecule first discovered it to me.''
361
362
363
standing) that he must publish lest he be forestalled; 42 Bessel and Schumacher warning Gauss that he will be anticipated (as he was) on every
side; 43 the elderly Legendre warning the young Karl Jacobi that the
younger Niels Abel would overtake him in the race for discoveries in the
theory of elliptic functions unless "you take possession of that which
belongs to you by letting your book appear at the earliest possible date." 44
Between them, Gauss and Bessel supply a beautifully ironic instance of
how apt it is for scientists to assume that their original discoveries will be
duplicated by others if they do not put them into print soon. For years
on end the faithful Bessel has been haranguing Gauss to publish his new
discoveries on pain of being forestalled. At last, Gauss behaves as Bessel
would have him behave. He publishes a treatise on dioptrics and sends a
copy to Bessel who, after heroically congratulating him on the work, ruefully reports that it thoroughly anticipates Bessel's own current but still
unpublished investigations. 45
Gauss supplies us with another striking instance of the scientist's or
mathematician's firm belief that a discovery or invention is not reserved to
himself alone. In 1795, at the ripe age of eighteen, he works out the
method of least squares. To him the method seems to flow so directly from
antecedent work that he is persuaded others must already have hit upon
it; he is willing to bet, for example, that Tobias Mayer must have known
it. 46 In this he was, of course, mistaken, as he learned later; his invention
of least squares had not been anticipated. Neverthless, he was abundantly
right in principle: the invention was bound to be a multiple. As things
turned out, it proved to be a quadruplet, with Legendre inventing it
independently in 1805 before Gauss had got around to publishing it, and
with Daniel Huber in Basel and Robert Adrain in the United States coming
up with it a little later. 47
There is a final and perhaps most decisive kind of evidence that the
community of scientists does in fact assume that discoveries are potential
multiples. This evidence is provided by the institutional expedients de42. Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (New York:
Appleton, 1925), 1: 426-27, 473.
43. Dunnington, Gauss, p. 216; C. A. F. Peters, ed., Briefwechsel zwischen C. F.
Gauss und H. C. Schumacher (Altona: Gustav Esch, 1860), 2: 82-83, 299-300,
3: 69, 75, 6: 10-11, 55.
44. Ore, Niels Henrik Abel, p. 203.
45. Briefwechsel zwischen Gauss und Bessel, Herausgegeben auf Veranlassung der
Koniglichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1880), pp. 531-32.
46. Briefwechsel zwischen Gauss und Schumacher, 3:387.
47. Dunnington, Gauss, p. 19. Adrain, the outstanding American mathematician
of his day, was involved in several multiples. See J. L. Coolidge, "Robert Adrain
and the Beginning of American Mathematics," American Mathematical Monthly 33
(Feb. 1926): 61-76.
364
From at least the sixteenth century and as late as the nineteenth, it will
also be remembered, discoveries were often reported in the form of
anagrams-as with Galileo's "triple star" of Saturn and Hooke's law of
tension-for the double purpose of establishing priority of conception and
yet of not putting rivals on to one's original ideas, until they had been
worked out further. 49 From the time of Newton, scientists have printed
short abstracts for the same purpose. 50 These and comparable expedients
all testify that scientists, even those who manifestly subscribe to the
contrary opinion, in practice assume that discoveries are potential multiples
and will remain singletons only if prompt action forestalls the later independent discovery. It would appear, then, that what might first have
seemed to be an incorrigible, perhaps outrageous, hypothesis about
multiples in science is in fact widely assumed by scientists themselves.
A great variety of evidence-I have here set out only ten related kindstestifies, then, to the hypothesis that, once science has become institutionalized, and significant numbers are at work on scientific investigation, the
same discoveries will be made independently more than once and that
singletons can be conceived of as forestalled multiples.
Patterns of Multiple Discoveries
Before turning to the last part of this paper-the part dealing with a
sociological conception of the role of genius in the advancement of science
-1 think it useful to report some findings from a methodical study of
multiple discoveries. Of the multitude of multiples, Dr. Elinor Barber and
I have undertaken to examine 264 intensively. The greatest part of these179 of them-are doublets; 51, triplets; 17, quadruplets; 6, quintuplets;
48. Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London (London: A.
Millar, 1756), 2:30. The French Academy of Sciences made extensive use of this arrangement; among the many documents deposited under seal was Lavoisier's on combustion; see Lavoisier Oeuvres de Lavoisier. Correspondance, ed., Rene Fric (Paris:
Michel, 1957), fasc. 2, pp. 388-89.
49. See chapter 14 of this volume.
50. See Birch, History of the Royal Society 4:437.
365
366
367
368
Kelvin which were not, so far as the record shows, made independently by
others but which, on our hypothesis, would have been made had it not
been for the widespread circulation of Kelvin's prior findings. Yet, even
on this incomplete showing, it would seem that this one man of scientific
genius was, in a reasonably exact sense, functionally equivalent to a sizable
number of other scientists. And still, by the same token, his individual
accomplishments in science remain undiminished when we note that he
was not individually indispensable for these discoveries (since they were
in fact made by others). This is the sense in which an enlarged sociological
theory can take account both of the environmental determination of
discovery while still providing for great variablity in the intellectual stature
of individual scientists.
Just a few words about another like instance, in quite another field of
science. Whatever else may be said about Sigmund Freud, he is undeniably
the prime creator of psychoanalysis. And still, only a first examination of
about a hundred of his publications finds him reporting that he was involved in an aggregate of more than thirty multiples, discoveries which he
made all unknowing that they had been made by others. Once again, the
pattern is much like that we found for Kelvin. Some of Freud's subsequently discovered anticipators were themselves minds of acknowledged
highest order: Schiller, von Hartmann, Schopenhauer, Fechner. But many
of the rest of his independent co-discoverers or anticipators are scarcely
apt to be known to most of us as distinguished for the highest quality of
scientific achievement; men such as Watkiss Lloyd, Kutschin, E. Hacker,
Grasset, Neufeld, and so on and on. It required a Freud to achieve individually what a large number of others achieved severally; it required a
Freud to focus the attention of many on ideas which might otherwise not
have come to their notice; in these and kindred aspects lay his genius. But
that he was not individually indispensable to the intellectual developments
for which he, more than any other, was historically responsible is indicated
by the many multiples in which he was in fact engaged and the many others
which, presumably, he forestalled by his individually incomparable genius.
What has been found to hold for Kelvin and Freud is being found to
hold for other scientists of the first rank who are now being examined
in the light of the theory. They are all scientists of multiple multiples; their
undeniable stature rests in doing individually what must otherwise be done
and, as we have reason to infer, at a much slower pace, by a substantial
number of other scientists, themselves of varying degrees of demonstrated
talent. The sociological theory of scientific discovery has no need, therefore, to retain the false disjunction between the cumulative development of
science and the distinctive role of the scientific genius.
369
There is perhaps time for a few needed and self-imposed caveats. For
I cannot escape the uneasy sense that this short though, you will grant me,
not entirely succinct, summary of masses of data on scientific discovery
must lend itself to misunderstanding. This is so, if only because so much
has unavoidably been left unsaid. As a preventive to such misunderstanding, may I conclude by listing some seeming implications which are
anything but implicit in what I have managed to report?
First, in presenting this modified version of a three-century-old conception of the course of scientific discovery, I do not imply that all discoveries
are inevitable in the sense that, come what may, they will be made, at the
time and the place, if not by the individual(s) who in fact made them.
Quite the contrary: there are, of course, cases of scientific discoveries
which could have been made generations, even centuries, before they
were actually made, in the sense that the principal ingredients of these
discoveries were long present in the culture. This recurrent fact of longdelayed discovery raises distinctive problems for the theory advanced here,
but these are not unsolvable problems.
Second, and perhaps contrary to the impression I have given, the theory
rejects the pointless practice of what I have called "adumbrationism,"
that is, the practice of claiming to find dim anticipations of current scientific
discoveries in older, and preferably ancient, work by the expedient of
excessively liberal interpretations of what is being said now and of what
was said then. The theory is not a twentieth-century version of the
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century quarrel between the ancients and the
moderns.
Third, the theory is not another version of Ecclesiastes, holding that
"there is no new thing under the sun." The theory provides for the growth,
differentiation, and development of science just as it allows for the fact
that new increments in science are in principle or in fact repeated increments. It allows also for occasional mutations in scientific theory which
are significantly new even though they are introduced by more than one
scientist.
Fourth, the theory does not hold that to be truly independent, multiples
must be chronologically simultaneous. This is only the limiting case. Even
discoveries far removed from one another in calendrical time may be
instructively construed as "simultaneous" or nearly so in social and cultural
time, depending upon the accumulated state of knowledge in the several
cultures and the structures of the several societies in which they appear.
Fifth, the theory allows for differences in the probability of actual, rather
than potential multiples according to the character of the particular discovery. Discoveries in science are of course not all of a piece. Some flow
370
directly from antecedent knowledge in the sense that they are widely
visible implications of what has gone just before. Other discoveries involve
more of a leap from antecedent knowledge, and these are perhaps less apt
to be actual multiples. But it is suggested that, in the end, these too
manifest the same processes of scientific development as the others.
Sixth, and above all, the theory rejects the false disjunction between the
social determination of scientific discovery and the role of the genius or
"great man" in science. By conceiving scientific genius sociologically, as
one who in his own person represents the functional equivalent of a
number and variety of often lesser talents, the theory maintains that the
genius plays a distinctive role in advancing science, often accelerating its
rate of development and sometimes, by the excess of authority attributed
to him, slowing further development.
Seventh and finally, the diverse implications of the theory are subject to
methodical investigation. The basic materials for such study can be drawn
from both historical evidence and from field inquiry into the experience of
contemporary scientists. What Bacon obliquely noticed and many others
recurrently examined can become a major focus in the contemporary
sociology of science.
17
Multiple
Discoveries as
Strategic
Research Site
1963
372
373
374
375
The history of science attests that this has typically been the case for
outstanding investigators in every science through the last three centuries.
The theoretic import of this should not be overlooked. It would be an
egregious blunder to allow the otherwise useful emphasis on trait-analysis
or on small-group research to deflect attention from the presumably great
part played, in scientific work, of social interaction with others who
are not in the local milieu. To do so would be to impose convenient
existing tools of investigation upon a problem for which they may not be
the most appropriate and, surely, not the exclusively appropriate ones. The
data, instruments, and theory dealing with larger aggregates of interacting
scientists and of spatially distant reference groups and individuals would
seem particularly in point for studying the behavior of scientists for whom
patterns of social interaction at a distance seem empirically central. This
is only a special case of a general hypothesis about "effective scope." 11
People in various social statuses differ in the radius of their significant
social environments: some, the locals, being primarily oriented toward
their local milieux, others, the cosmopolitans, being primarily oriented
toward the larger society and responsive to it. The systematic study of
multiples and priorities in scientific discovery-which of course typically
engage scientists with others outside their local environment-thus provides
one basis for investigating extended social relations between scientists and
the effects of these upon their work.
It may be useful to put much the same point in a slightly different
context. Historians of science and other scholars have long used the
phrase, "the community of scientists." For the most part, this has remained
an apt metaphor rather than becoming a productive concept. Yet it need
not remain a literary figure of speech: apt and chaste, untarnished by
actual use. For we find that the community of scientists is a dispersed
rather than a geographically compact collectivity. The structure of this
community cannot, therefore, be adequately understood by focusing only
on the small local groups of which scientists are a part. The sheer fact
that multiple discoveries are made by scientists working independently
of one another testifies to the further crucial fact that, though remote in
space, they are responding to much the same social and intellectual forces
that impinge upon them all. In a word, the Robinson Crusoe of science is
just as much a figment as the Robinson Crusoe of old-fashioned economics.
He is an illusion, created by a scheme of thought that requires us to look
only inward at thought processes and so to abstract entirely from the
wider social and cultural contexts of that thought. Occasional scientists
may suppose that they really work alone, meaning by this not the evident
fact that only individual men and women, not "the group," think and
11. Lazarsfeld and Thielens, Academic Mind, pp. 262-65.
376
develop imaginative ideas but that they do so, all apart from environing
structures of values, social relations, and socially as well as intellectually
induced foci of attention. But, as multiple discoveries testify, this image
of the man of science is just as much a case of the fallacy of misplaced
concreteness as is the equivalent image of the man of business "who
ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant
protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert." 12 For scientists,
even the most lonely of lone wolves among them, are all "members of one
another." The study of multiples shows how scientists are bound to the
past by building upon a deposit of accumulated knowledge, how they are
bound to the present by interacting with others in the course of their work
and having their attention drawn to particular problems and ideas by
socially and intellectually accentuated interests, and how they are bound
to the future by the obligation inherent in their social role to pass on an
augmented knowledge and a more fully specified ignorance. The community of scientists extends both in time and in space.
These three respects in which the study of multiples provides a strategic
research site are simply different facets of the same guiding conception:
they supplement current emphases in research on the behavior of scientists
by conceiving that behavior as a resultant not only of the idiosyncratic
characteristics and the local ambiance of scientists, but also of their place
within the wider social structure and culture. Beyond these are quite other
uses of the study of multiples.
A fourth use is to help us identify certain significant similarities and
differences between the various branches of science. To the extent that the
rate of multiples and the types of rediscoveries are much the same in the
social and psychological sciences as in the physical and life sciences, we
are led to similarities between them, just as differences in such rates and
types alert us to differences between them. In short, the study of multiples
can supplement the traditional notion of the unity of all science, a notion
usually formulated in terms of the logic of method. It can lead us to
reexamine this unity from the standpoint of the actual behavior of scientists
in each of the major divisions of science and so to identify their distinctive
relations to their respective social and cultural environments. This type of
behavioral inquiry does not, of course, replace inquiries into the philosophy
of science or the logical foundations of scientific method. It supplements
them, by attending to what men in the various sciences actually do, rather
than by limiting us to what textbooks of scientific method tell us they
should do, as they go about their work.
12. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1926).
377
378
379
380
381
entailing so much replication of effort that the last increment will not
appreciably increase that probability. They help us distinguish between the
psychological experience of individual scientists who originate a new and
fruitful idea or make a new and fruitful observation from the independent
social process through which this discovery succeeds or fails to become
incorporated in the then-current body of scientific knowledge. So much,
then, for this sixth set of uses that make up the rationale for the systematic
study of multiples in science.
A seventh use I have examined at some length elsewhere, 18 and will
therefore only summarize here. The methodical investigation of multiples
enables us to develop a sociological theory of the role of scientific genius
in the development of science. This new theory does away with the false
disjunction between a heroic theory of science, that ascribes all basic
advances to genius, and an environmental theory, that holds these geniuses
to have been altogether dispensable, since if they had not lived, things
would have turned out pretty much as they did. These traditionally opposed theories are not inherently opposed; they become so only when, as
has been the case, they are pushed to indefensible extremes. In an
enlarged sociological conception, men of scientific genius are precisely
those whose discoveries, had they remained contemporaneously unknown,
would eventually be rediscovered. But these rediscoveries would be made
not by a single scientist but by an aggregate of scientists. On this view,
the individual man of scientific genius is the functional equivalent of a
considerable array of other scientists of varying degrees of talent. The
evidence for this conception is in part provided by the multiplicity of
multiples in which men of undeniable scientific genius have been involved.
An eighth and, for present purposes, final use has to do with what might
be described as the therapeutic function which the study of multiples serves
for the community of scientists. But I shall postpone further examination
of this use until the close of the next chapter, when we shall have covered
some of the evidence indicating that there is ample need for this therapeutic
function among scientists of our own day just as there was among scientists
of the past.
Perhaps enough has been said about the rationale for the systematic
study of multiples. If there is any merit to the opinion that the subject has
at least an eight-fold promise for enlarging our understanding of how
science develops, there naturally arises the question: why, then, has such
systematic 19 study been largely absent? Like many other questions in the
18. See chapter 16 of this volume. See also an abbreviated version of this paper,
"The Role of Genius in Scientific Advance," New Scientist, no. 259 (2 Nov. 1961):
306-8.
19. To avoid misunderstanding, it should be reiterated that I refer only to the
systematic investigation of multiples and frequent conflicts over priority. The ubiquity
382
18
The
Ambivalence
of Scientists
1963
Many of the endlessly recurrent facts about multiples and priorities are
readily accessible-in the diaries and letters, the note-books, scientific
papers, and biographies of scientists. This only compounds the mystery of
why so little systematic attention has been accorded the subject. The facts
have been noted, for they are too conspicuous to remain unobserved, but
then they have been quickly put aside, swept under the rug, and forgotten.
We seem to have here something like motivated neglect of this aspect of
the behavior of scientists and that is precisely the hypothesis I want to
examine now.
This resistance to the study of multiples and priorities can be conceived
as a resultant of intense forces pressing for public recognition of scientific
accomplishments that are held in check by countervailing forces, inherent
in the social role of scientists, which press for the modest acknowledgment
of limitations, if not for downright humility. Such resistance is a sign of
malintegration of the social institution of science which incorporates potentially incompatible values: among them, the value set upon originality,
which leads scientists to want their priority to be recognized, and the
value set upon due humility, which leads them to insist on how little they
have in fact been able to accomplish. To blend these potential incompatibles into a single orientation and to reconcile them in practice is no
easy matter. Rather, as we shall now see, the tension between these
kindred values creates an inner conflict among men of science who have
internalized both of them. Among other things, the tension generates a
First published as a part of "Resistance to the Systematic Study of Multiple Discoveries in Science," European Journal of Sociology 4 ( 1963): 250-82; reprinted
with permission. A condensed version of part of this paper appears under this title
in the Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, 112 (February 1963): 77-97.
384
385
seems to work out.fairly well. The rule is this: whenever the biography or
autobiography of a scientist announces that he had little or no concern
with priority of discovery, there is a reasonably good chance that, not many
pages later in the book, we shall find him deeply embroiled in one or
another battle over priority. A few cases must stand here for many:
Of the great surgeon, W. S. Halsted (who together with Osler, Kelly, and
Welch founded the Johns Hopkins Medical School), Harvey Cushing
writes: he was "overmodest about his work, indifferent to matters of
priority." 4 Our rule of thumb leads us to expect what we find: some twenty
pages later in the book in which this is cited, we find a letter by Halsted
about his work on cocaine as an anesthesia: "I anticipated all of Schleich's
work by about six years (or five) .... [In Vienna,] I showed Wolfler how
to use cocaine. He had declared that it was useless in surgery. But before
I left Vienna he published an enthusiastic article in one of the daily
papers on the subject. It did not, however, occur to him to mention my
name." 5
Or again, the authoritative biography of that great psychiatrist of the
Salpetriere, Charcot, approvingly quotes the eulogy which says, among
other things, that despite his many discoveries, Charcot "never thought for
a moment to claim priority or reward." Alerted by our rule of thumb, we
find some thirty pages later an account of Charcot insisting on his having
been the first to recognize exophthalmic goiter and, a little later, emphatically affirming that he "would like to claim priority" for the idea of
isolating patients who are suffering from hysteria. 6
But perhaps the most apt case of such denial of an accessible reality is
that of Ernest Jones, writing in his comprehensive biography that "although Freud was never interested in questions of priority, which he found
merely boring"-surely this is a classic case of trivialization at work"he was fond of exploring the source of what appeared to be original ideas,
particularly his own." 7 This is an extraordinarily illuminating statement.
For, of course, no one could have "known" better than Jones-:-"known"
in the narrowly cognitive sense-how very often Freud turned to matters
of priority: in his own work, in the work of his colleagues (both friends
and enemies), and in the history of psychology altogether.
4. In his magisterial biography, Harvey Cushing (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas,
1946), pp. 119-20, John F. Fulton describes Cushing's biographical sketch of Halsted,
from which this excerpt is quoted, as "an excellent description."
5. Ibid., p. 142.
6. Georges Gullain, 1.-M. Charcot: His Life, His Work, ed. and trans. Pearce
Bailey (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1959), pp. 61, 95-96, 142-43.
7. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 3 vols. (London: Hogarth Press,
1957), 3:105. Contrast David Riesman, who takes ample note of Freud's interest
in priority, in Individualism Reconsidered (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1954 ), pp. 31415, 378.
386
In point of fact, Dr. Elinor Barber and I have identified more than one
hundred fifty occasions on which Freud exhibited an interest in priority.
Freud himself reports, with characteristic self-awareness, that he even
dreamt about priority and the due allocation of credit for accomplishmerit
in science. 8 He oscillates between the poles of his ambivalence toward
8. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill, 3rd ed.
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1932), p. 175. "Now [my dream] means: 'I am indeed
the man who has written that valuable and successful treatise (on cocaine).' " This
near-miss in being recognized as the discoverer of cocaine as a local anesthetic
is of periodic interest to Freud throughout the greater part of his life. Freud
simply cannot put it to rest. At the time he is moving toward the idea, in 1884,
he writes his fiancee, Martha, about his "toying with a project . . . ; perhaps nothing
will come of this, either. It is a therapeutic experiment involving the use of cocaine.
. . . There may be any number of other people experimenting on it already;
perhaps it won't work. But I am certainly going to try it and, as you know,
if one tries something often enough and goes on wanting it, one day it may
succeed" (Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud [New York: Basic Books,
1960], pp. 107-8). Seven months later, he writes his future sister-in-law that
" 'Cocaine has brought me a great deal of credit, but the lion's share has gone
elsewhere'" (quoted by Ernest Jones in his detailed chapter on ''The Cocaine Episode,"
Freud: Life and Work, 1:98). Two years later he is writing Martha about an episode in the Salpetriere when the distinguished American ophthalmologist, Hermann
Knapp, "who has written a lot about cocaine" says to another of Freud, "it was he
who started it all" (Ibid., 209). Evidently the episode stung, for not to cite the other
intervening allusions to it, Freud is writing Fritz Wittels about "the cocaine story,"
some thirty-eight years later, on the occasion of an English translation of Wittels'
objectionable biography of Freud: "I guessed its usefulness for the eye, but for private reasons (in order to travel) had to drop the experiment and personally charged
my friend Konigstein to test the drug on the eye .... Konigstein (it was he, not I,
who so deeply regretted having missed winning these laurels) then claimed to be considered the codiscoverer [with Koller] and . . . both Konigstein and Koller chose
Julius Wagner and myself as the arbitrators. I think it did us both honor that each
of us took the side of the opposing client. Wagner, as Koller's delegate, voted in
favor of recognizing Konigstein's claim, whereas I was wholeheartedly in favor of
awarding the credit to Koller alone. I can no longer remember [reports Freud] what
compromise we decided on" (Letters of Sigmund Freud, p. 351). About the same
time, Freud puts all this in print (in An Autobiographical Study [1925; London:
Hogarth Press, 1948], pp. 24-25}, explaining that, "While I was in the middle of
this work, an opportunity arose for making a journey to visit my fiancee, from whom
I had been parted for two years. I hastily wound up my investigation of cocaine and
contented myself in my book on the subject with prophesying that further uses for
it would soon be found. I suggested, however, to my friend Konigstein, the ophthalmologist, that he should investigate the question of how far the anaesthetizing
properties of cocaine were applicable in diseases of the eye. When I returned from
my holiday, I found that not he, but another of my friends, Carl Koller (now in New
York), whom I had also spoken to about cocaine, had made the decisive experiments.
. . . Koller is therefore rightly regarded as the discoverer of local anaesthesia by
cocaine, which has become so important in minor surgery; [but, adds Freud in so
many words] I bore my fiancee no grudge for the interruption of my work." All apart
from the cocaine story, Freud, with the resolute self-scrutiny that left little place for .
self-deception, analyzes another of his dreams as having at its root "an arrogant
phantasy of ambition, but that in its stead only its suppression and abasement has
reached the dream-content." Interpretation of Dreams, p. 440.
387
388
Freud, Collected Papers, 4 vols. [London: Hogarth Press, 1949], 1:148). This, as
the editor indicates, is the first use of the term, "psycho-analytic," and since the thirtyyear-old Freud cannot yet know what will eventually turn out to be encompassed by
this method, he simply identifies it with the "probing procedure" of Breuer.
[1896] In his paper "The Aetiology of Hysteria," published in the same year,
Freud of course continues to refer to "Breuer's method" and starts with "the
momentous discovery of J. Breuer: that the symptoms of hysteria (apart from
stigmata) are determined by certain experiences of the patient's which operate traumatically and are reproduced in his psychic life as memory-symbols of these experiences." This is the paper in which he reports, without reservations, that "at the
bottom of every case of hysteria will be found one or more experiences of premature sexual experience, belonging to the first years of childhood, which may be reproduced by analytic work though whole decades have intervened"-a judgment
which he was of course to find mistaken and one which he was to retract and, courageously and imaginatively, to convert into the problem of why these traumatic
experiences were so often a matter of phantasy. In it he refers to "Breuer's method"
on a half-dozen or so occasions, but we see how he begins to differentiate some of
his own ideas from those of Breuer (Collected Papers, 1:183-219).
[1904] By this time, Freud becomes clear and makes it clear to others how he
has moved beyond Breuer: e.g. "The particular method of psychotherapy which
Freud practises and terms psycho-analysis is an outgrowth [n.b.] of the so-called
cathartic treatment discussed by him in collaboration with J. Breuer. . . . At the
personal suggestion of Breuer, Freud revived this method and tried it with a large
number of patients. . . . The changes which Freud introduced in Breuer's cathartic method of treatment were at first changes in technique; these, however, brought
about new results and have finally necessitated a different though not contradictory
conception of the therapeutic task" ("Freud's psycho-analytic method," Collected
Papers, 1:264-65, this being Freud's contribution to Lowenfeld's Psychische Zwangerscheinungen).
[1905] There is something of a regression here, from the newly perceived differentiation, when Freud refers to "that cathartic or psycho-analytic investigation, discovered by J. Breuer and me" ("Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex," in The
Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. by A. A. Brill [New York: Modern
Library, 1938], p. 573 ).
[1905] But in the same year, Freud definitely dissociates himself from one of
Breuer's ideas, saying that: "If, where a piece of joint work is in question, it is
legitimate to make a subsequent division of property, I should like to take this opportunity of stating that the hypothesis of 'hypnoid states'-which many reviewers
were inclined to regard as the central portion of our work-sprang entirely from
the initiative of Breuer. I regard the use of such a term as superfluous and misleading" ("Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria," Collected Papers, 3:35n).
[1909] Attaching great importance to the international recognition accorded
psychoanalysis by the invitation to speak at the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Clark University, Freud was carried away, temporarily abandoning the
distinctive roles he had gradually assigned Breuer and himself, and said unequivocally: "Granted that it is a merit to have created psycho-analysis, it is not my merit.
I was a student busy with the passing of my last examinations, when another physician of Vienna, Dr. Joseph Breuer, made the first application of this method to a
case of an hysterical girl (1880-1882)." Sigmund Freud, "Origin and development
of psycho-analysis," American Journal of Psychology 21 (1910): 181-218, at 181.
The paper, with this statement, appeared simultaneously in English and German and
was soon translated into Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and Italian.
[1914] Five years later, Freud expressed second thoughts on the matter: "In 1909,
in the lecture-room of an American university, I had my first opportunity of
speaking in public about psycho-analysis. The occasion was a momentous one for
my work, and moved by this thought I then declared that it was not I who had
brought psycho-analysis into existence: the credit for this was due to someone else;
389
390
and again to his priority conflict with Janet, 15 reporting that he had brought
the recalcitrant Breuer to agree to an early publication of their joint monograph because "in the meantime, Janet's work had anticipated some of his
[Breuer's] results"; 16 he writes nostalgically about the days of "my splendid
isolation" when "there was nothing to hustle me. . . . My publications,
which I was able to place with a little trouble, could always lag far behind
my knowledge and could be postponed as long as I pleased, since there
was no doubtful 'priority' to be defended"; 17 he repeatedly allocates
priorities among others (Le Bon, Ferenczi, Bleuler, Stekel, being only a
few among the many) ;18 he even credits Adler with priority for an error; 19
during only one short episode of his long life" ("Josef Breuer," Standard Edition ...
of Freud, 19:279-80).
This short synopsis of Freud's recurring attempts over a span of some forty years
to distinguish his contributions from those of Breuer's suggests the possibility that,
partly owing to the social pressures upon him to establish the nature of his own
originality, he was not altogether uninterested in what he described as "of no great
importance" and as an "uninteresting point"; not, at least, if matters of "interest"
are those which engage the attention.
15. Of the many occasions on which Freud returned to this matter of Pierre
Janet's claim to priority, I cite only "On the history of the psycho-analytic movement," Standard Edition . . . of Freud, 14:32-33; and An Autobiographical Study,
pp. 21, 33, 54-55, where he seeks "to put an end to the glib repetition of the view
that whatever is of value in psycho-analysis is merely borrowed from the ideas of
Janet. ... Historically, psycho-analysis is completely independent of Janet's discoveries, just as in its content it diverges from them and goes far beyond them." For
some of Janet's not always delicate insinuations, see his Psychological Healing (New
York: Macmillan, 1925), 1:601-40.
16. An Autobiographical Study, pp. 36-37; "Josef Breuer," Standard Edition ...
of Freud, 19:279-80: "At the date of the publication of our Studies, we were able
to appeal to Charcot's writings and to Pierre Janet's investigations, which had by
that time deprived Breuer's discoveries of some of their priority. But when Breuer
was treating his first case (in 1881-2) none of this was as yet available. Janet's
Automatisme psychologique appeared in 1889 and his second work, L'etat mental
des hysteriques, not until 1892. It seems that Breuer's researches were wholly
original, and were directed only by the hints offered to him by the material of his
case."
17. "On the history of the psycho-analytic movement," Standard Edition . . .
of Freud, 14:22. With regard to the pattern of biographers and disciples imposing
their illusory convictions upon the actual experience of men of science, consider
that the translation of this passage by A. A. Brill completely omits, presumably
as inconsequential, the phrase: "There was no doubtful 'priority' to be defended."
See The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, p. 943.
18. References to these will be found scattered through Freud's publications and
letters: e.g., Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (London: Hogarth Press,
1921), pp. 23-24, alludes to Le Bon having been anticipated by Sighele in his most
important idea of "the collective inhibition of intellectual functioning and the heightening of affectivity in groups." On this case, see R. K. Merton, introduction to
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (New York: Viking Press, 1960), pp. vii-xviii. To
Ferenczi, he writes: "Your priority in all this is evident." Jones, Sigmund Freud,
3:353-54.
19. Grimly, Freud writes in the midst of his counter-attack on the secessionist:
"Adler must also be credited with priority in confusing dreams with latent dream-
391
392
though one were a raker of muck that a gentleman would pass by in silence.
Even more, to investigate the subject systematically is to be regarded not
merely as a muckraker, but as a muckmaker. 22
The behavior of fellow scientists involved in multiples and priority
contests tends to be condemned or applauded rather than analyzed. It is
morally evaluated, not systematically investigated. Disputes over priority
are simply described as "unfortunate," and the moral judgment is substituted for the effort to understand what this implies for the psychology of
scientists and the sociology of science as an institution. We find Goethe
referring to "all those foolish quarrels about earlier and later discovery,
plagiary, and quasi-purloinings." 23 We are free, of course, to find this
behavior unfortunate or foolish or comic or sad. But these aff~ctive
responses to the behavior of our ancestors- or brothers-in-science seem to
have usurped the place that might be given over to analysis of this behavior
and its implications for the ways in which science develops. It is a little
as though the physician were to respond only evaluatively to illness,
describe it as unfortunate or painful, and consider his task done; or as
though the psychiatrist were to describe the behavior of schizophrenics as
absurd and let it go at that; or as though the criminologist were to substitute his sentiment that certain crimes are appalling and despicable for the
22. Historians of scientific and other ideas are nevertheless rebelling against
bowdlerized versions of the life and work of scientists. George Sarton, for example,
urges attention "to the long travail and maybe the suffering which led to each
[discovery], the mistakes which were made, the false tracks which were followed, the
misunderstandings, the quarrels, the victories and the failures; . . . the gradual
unveiling of all the contingencies and hazards which constitute the warp and woof
of living science" (A Guide to the History of Science [Waltham, Mass.: Chronica
Botanica Co., 1952], p. 41). A. C. Crombie observes that "we must completely
misunderstand Newton the man, and we run the risk of missing the essential
processes of a mind so profoundly original and individual as his, if we exclude all
those influences and interests that may be distasteful to us, or seem to us odd in a
scientist. On closer examination it may tum out in fact that it was those very
things that were his chief interest and that most profoundly affected his scientific
imagination" ("Newton's Conception of Scientific Method," Bulletin of the Institute
of Physics, Nov. 1957, pp. 350-62, at 361). And Jacques Barzun finds merely tiresome
the homilies that pass as descriptions of scientists at work, reminding us that "science
is made by man, in the light of interests, errors and hopes, just like poetry, philosophy
and human history itself. To say this is not to degrade science, as naive persons
might think; it is on the contrary to enhance its achievements by showing that they
sprang not from patience on a monument but from genius toiling in the mud"
(Teacher in America [Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1954], p. 90).
As far back as the 1840s Augustus de Morgan had complained about the "curious
tendency of biographers [particularly of scientists] to exalt those of whom they
write into monsters of perfection." No one could ever accuse de Morgan of this
practice, particularly when he was writing about Newton. See his Essays on the Life
and Work of Newton (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1914), pp. 62-63.
23. Goethe's Briefe in Werke (Weimar: Hermann Boehlaus, 1903), 27:219-23. I
am indebted to Aaron Noland, of the Journal of the History of Ideas, for calling my
attention to this passage.
393
effort to discover what brings these crimes about. The history of the
sciences shows that the provisional emancipation from sentiment in order
to investigate phenomena methodically has been a most difficult task and
has occurred at different times in the various sciences and at different
times for selected problems within each of the sciences. Emancipation
from sentiment came fairly early in the history of much of medicine; it
came very late in the history of the treatment of the mentally ill and the
analysis of criminal behavior. I suggest that only now are we beginning
to emancipate the study of the concrete behavior of scientists from the
altogether human tendency to respond to it in terms of the sentiments and
values which we have made our own rather than to examine some of that
behavior in reasonably detached fashion.
In regard to the study of multiples and priorities, apparently, we must
remember again-what we all know in the abstract but are sometimes
inclined to forget when we get down to new cases-that, as Clerk Maxwell
noted, "It was a great step in science when men became convinced that, in
order to understand the nature of things, they must begin by asking, not
whether a thing is good or bad, noxious or beneficial, but of what kind it
is? and how much is there of it? Quality and quantity were then first
recognized as the primary features to be observed in scientific inquiry." 24
Contributing to the substitution of sentiment for analysis and so to the
resistance against systematic study of multiples and their often connected
disputes over priority is the often painful contrast between the actual
behavior of scientists and the behavior ideally prescribed for them.
For all of us who harbor the ideal image of the scientist, it may be
disconcerting to have Edmond Halley forthrightly described by the first
Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, as being just as "lazy and slothful as
he is corrupt." And then, bringing an even greater mime into the drama,
he goes on to write:
With my lunar observations he [Halley] gives her true places and latitudes,
which are copied from the three large synopses that I imparted to Sir Isaac
Newton, under this condition that he should not impart them to anybody, without my leave. Yet so true to his word, and so candid is the Knight, that he
immediately imparted it to Halley; who has printed them as far as they reach .
. . . The lazy and malicious thief would scarce be at the pains to gather them
himself. 25
24. James Clerk Maxwell, "Relation of mathematics and physics," an address to
the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1870.
25. Francis Baily, An Account of the Rev. John Flamsteed, the First AstronomerRoyal; Compiled from his own Manuscripts, and other Authentic Documents, never
before published (London: Printed by Order of the Lords Commissioners of the
Admiralty, 1835), pp. 323-24. Much of this volume is devoted to the "notorious"
and angry disputes over priority and intellectual property engaging Flamsteed and
Newton and Halley, among others.
394
395
396
397
that by sheer coincideJlce of circumstances the same ideas developed independently. By using a technique of quoting only each other, that is, those who
belong to their clique, and not quoting any of my close associates or myself,
their double game became the laughing stock of the connoisseurs.41
In much the same fashion but covering a broader scope, Pitirim Sorokin
attacks what he describes as "amnesia and the discoverer's complex" in
modern sociology and psychosocial science. He flails social scientists
whom he sees as having borrowed from past observers without acknowledgement and aims his heaviest guns at those he regards as having filched
ideas from their contemporaries which are then put forward as their own.
Once again, the language is that of an angry Galileo, Flamsteed, or Hooke.
Thus, the concept of the "basic personality structure" is described as "a
vague variation of a very old concept 'pilfered' from sociologists."42
Leopold von Wiese is approvingly quoted as having written that certain
social theorists have "a strange lack of references to their predecessors"
and, despite the "essential similarity" of sociological framework, they have
a "complete lack of references to theories of mine [Sorokin's] published
many years before. " 43 Most often, Sorokin says, claims to priority are
probably due to "the ignorance of our pseudo-discoverers, many of whom
are newcomers from other fields," such as statistics, and have failed to live
up to the obligation to find out what has gone before. 44 Beyond this merely
ignorant group, he writes, the "wouldbe Columbuses" of social science
today include "an insignificant fraction of deliberate plagiarists." Some
of these
pseudo-discoverers are the victims of ambitions far exceeding their creative
potential and of our society's competitive mores and its cult of success. Driven
by their Narcissistic complex and by the ever-operating forces of rivalry, they
are eager to overestimate their achievements, to advertise them as 'discoveries
made for the first time,' and with a semirational naivete they are apt sincerely
to fool themselves and others with their claims.45
And finally, almost as an echo of Ward writing to Ross about Small, or
of Mosca writing about Pareto, or Freud about Adler, Sorokin refers to
the "technique of using new terms for old concepts to give them a look of
41. Ibid., p. cii.
42. Pitirim A. Sorokin, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences
(Chicago: Henry Regnery Co. 1956), p. 13.
43. Ibid., p. 14.
44. Ibid., p. 17.
45. Ibid., p. 19.
398
Ibid., p. 19.
"The Moses of Michelangelo," in Freud, Collected Papers, 4:284-85.
Moreno, Who Shall Survive?, p. cvi.
Cf. Chapter 14 in this volume.
399
400
prominent scholars of our century; but I doubt if any one of them would have
thought that public recognition of his achievements-by a title, a medal, a
prize, or an honorary degree-played a decisive role in motivating his
enthusiasm for research. When a prize brings both honor and cash, many
sc:entists would even be more inclined to admit being pleased about the
money ('one must live') than about the public recognition ('I am not sensitive
to fl~ttery'). Why do even the greatest minds stoop to such falsehoods? For,
without being conscious lies, these ratiocinations are undoubtedly false. Many
of the really talented scientists are not at all money-minded; nor do they
condone greed for wealth either in themselves or in others. On the other hand,
all the scientists I know sufficiently well to judge (and I include myself in this
group) are extremely anxious to have their work recognized and approved by
others. Is it not below the dignity of an objective scientific mind to permit such
a distortion of his true motives? Besides, what is there to be ashamed of? 52
Dr. Selye's final question need not remain a rhetorical one. Shame is
experienced when one's identity and self-image are suddenly violated by
one's actual behavior-as in the case of the shame we have seen expressed
by Darwin when his own behavior forced him to realize that recognition
of his priority meant more to him than he had ever been willing to suppose.
To admit to a deep-seated wish for recognition may seem to prefer
recognition to the joy of discovery as an end in itself, activating the further
awareness that the pleasure of recognition for accomplishment could, and
perhaps momentarily did, replace the pleasure of scientific work for its
own sake.
On the surface, this hunger for recognition appears as mere personal
vanity, generated from within and craving satisfaction from without. But
this is truly a superficial diagnosis, compounded of a moralizing deprecation of self or others and representing a classic instance of the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness in which relevant sociological details are suppressed by exclusive attention to the feeling-states of the particular
individual scientist. When we reach deeper and wider, into the institutional
complex that gives point to this hunger for recognition, it turns out to be
anything but personal and individual, repeated as it is with slight variation
by one scientist after another. Vanity, so-called, is then seen as the outer
face of the inner need for assurance that one's work really matters, that
one has measured up to the hard standards maintained by a community of
scientists. It then becomes clear that the institution of science reinforces,
when it does not create, this deep-rooted need for validation of work
accomplished. Sometimes, of course, the need is stepped up until it gets
out of hand: the desire for recognition becomes a driving lust for acclaim
(even when unwarranted), megalomania replaces the comfort of reassurance. But the extreme case need not be mistaken for the modal one.
52. Hans Selye, The Stress of Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), p. 288. On
the same point, see chapter 15 of this volume.
401
402
with a Gay-Lussac, seizing upon the person nearest him for a victory waltz
so that he could "express his ecstasy on the occasion of a new discovery
by the poetry of motion." 54 Or, to come closer home, William James "all
aflame" with his idea of pragmatism and hardly able to contain his exhilaration over it. 55 Or, in more restrained exuberance, Joseph Henry, once
he had hit upon a new way of constructing electromagnets, reporting that
"when this conception came into my brain, I was so pleased with it that I
could not help rising to my feet and giving it my hearty approbation." 56
Or finally, the young Freud writing his "darling girl," Martha, of his "joy"
in a "discovery which may not be insignificant": a new technique of
staining nervous tissue with a solution of gold chloride,57 or, years later,
reminding Karl Abraham that "we have the incomparable pleasure of
gaining the first insights." 58
In short, when a scientist has made a genuine discovery, he is as happy
as a scientist can be. But the peak of exhilaration may only deepen the
plunge into despair should the discovery be taken from him. 59 If the loss is
occasioned only by finding that it was, in truth, not a first but a later
independent discovery, the blow may be severe enough, though mitigated
by the sad consolation that at least the idea has been confirmed by another.
But this is as nothing, of course, when compared with the traumatizing
charge that not only was the discovery later than another of like kind but
that it really was borrowed or even stolen. Rather than being mutually
exclusive, joy in discovery and eagerness for recognition by scientific peers
are stamped out of the same psychological coin. They can both express a
basic commitment to the value of advancing knowledge.
Cryptomnesia ("Unconscious Plagiary")
Further complicating the already complex emotions that attend multiple
discoveries is the phenomenon of so-called "unconscious plagiary." Inter54. Edward Thorpe, Essays in Historical Chemistry (London: Macmillan, 1931).
55. See James's letter to Flournoy, in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and
Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), 2:452.
56. Thomas Coulson, Joseph Henry: His Life and Work (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1950), 49-50. The self-effacing Henry, it will be remembered, was
periodically involved in multiples and, on occasion, in disputes over priority as evidenced not least in his candid report of great disappointment over Faraday's having
been regarded as the prior discoverer of electromagnetic induction.
57. Letters of Sigmund Freud, p. 72.
58. Ibid., p. 286.
59. For an example, witness the account sent to Gauss by Schumacher, of Niels
Abel's dismay upon learning that he had been anticipated by Jacobi, with Abel needing some brandy to sustain himself, and Schumacher's concluding remark: "Wenn
Sie einmal Ihre Untersuchungen bekannt machen, wird es ihm wahrscheinlich noch
mehr an Schnapps kosten" (Briefwechsel zwischen C. F. Gauss und H. C. Schumacher, ed. C. A. F. Peters [Altona: Gustav Esch, 1860], 2:179).
403
404
left a considerable portion of his statistical library for me. I have noticed this
volume, though I do not recall ever looking into it. Nevertheless, there does
seem to me to be a real possibility that on some occasion I did look at it, note
the numbering system, forget it, but then did think it up 'fresh' when faced
with a numbering problem.6t
What holds for this little instance holds also for discoveries of consequence
to science: the possibility of cryptomnesia leads some to doubt their own
powers of recall and to assume that what they once thought to be their
original idea may be, after all, the trace of a forgotten exposure to the
idea as set forth by another.
Among the many cases in point, consider only these few. Having had
the experience at age nineteen of learning that his discovery in optics was
'only' a rediscovery, William Rowan Hamilton, the mathematical genius
who discovered quaternions (in part, independently invented by Grassmann), developed a lifelong preoccupation with the twin fear of being
plagiarized and of unwittingly plagiarizing others. As he put it on one of
the many occasions on which he turned to this subject in his correspondence with de Morgan: "As to myself, I am sure that I must have often
reproduced things which I had read long before, without being able to
identify them as belonging to other persons. " 62 Or again: "But about the
'sighing'-am I to quarrel with Dickens, or figure in one of his publications
of a later date? Where is the priority business to end? I am sick of it as
you can be; but still, in anything important as regards science, I should
take it as a favour to be warned, if I were inadvertently exposing myself to
the charge of plagiarising. "63
Turning from mathematics to psychology, we find Freud characteristically examining his own experience, remembering that he had been
given Borne's works when he was fourteen and still had the book fifty
years later, so that although "he could not remember the essay in question," which dealt with free association as a procedure for creative writing,
"it does not appear impossible to us that this hint may perhaps have
uncovered that piece of cryptomnesia which, in so many cases, may be
suspected behind an apparent originality." 64 In reviewing the multiple
61. W. Allen Wallis, personal communication.
62. R. P. Graves, Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis,
1882), 3:297. This extensive biography includes scores of letters by Hamilton which
report his pervasive concern with matters of priority, rediscovery, the giving of
credit for originality in science, plagiary, scientists' desire for immortal fame, anticipations, fear of being forestalled, etc. As de Morgan observed, Hamilton was
obsessed by possible cryptomnesia: "He had a morbid fear of being a plagiarist; and
the letters which he wrote to those who had treated like subjects with himself sometimes contained curious and far-fetched misgivings about his own priority" (Ibid.,
3:217).
63. Ibid., 3:368.
64. Quoted from Freud's anonymous paper, "A note on the pre-history of the
technique of analysis," by Lewis W. Brandt in his instructive paper dealing with
405
discovery of part of the "theory of dreams" by Popper-Lynkeus and himself, Freud has this to say:
The subjective side of originality also deserves consideration. A scientific
worker may sometimes ask himself what was the source of the ideas peculiar
to himself which he has applied to his material. As regards some of them he
will discover without much reflection the hints from which they were derived,
the statements made by other people which he has picked out ahd modified
and whose implications he has elaborated. But as regards others of his ideas
he can make no such acknowledgements; he can only suppose that these
thoughts and lines of approach were generated-he cannot tell how-in his
own mental activity, and it is on them that he bases his claim to originality.
Careful psychological investigation, however, diminishes this claim still
further. It reveals hidden and long-forgotten sources which gave the stimulus
to the apparently original ideas, and it replaces the ostensible new creation by
a revival of something forgotten applied to fresh material. There is nothing
to regret in this; we had no right to expect that what was 'original' could be
untraceable and undetermined.
In my case,. too, the originality of many of the new ideas employed by me
in the interpretation of dreams and in psycho-analysis has evaporated in this
way. I am ignorant of the source of only one of these ideas ["dreamcensorship"]. as
It was this sort of thing, no doubt, that prompted the irrepressible Mark
406
concludes, and concludes this although it proved impossible to find anyone who had actually read her the story.67
Contributing further to the uncertainty about the extent of one's
originality is the recurrence of episodes in which a scientist has unwittingly
borrowed ideas from himself. Many scientists and scholars have found,
to their combined chagrin and disbelief, that an idea which seemed to
have come to them out of the blue had actually been formulated by them
years before, and then forgotten. An old notebook, a resurrected paper, a
colleague cursed with total recall, a former student-any of these can make
it plain that what was thought to be a new departure was actually a repetition (or at most, an extended and improved version) of what they had
worked out for themselves in the past. Of many such cases, consider only
a few, some of a century or more ago, others of contemporary vintage:
Joseph Priestley records with chagrin that
I have so completely forgotten what I have myself published, that in reading
my own writings, what I find in them often appears perfectly new to me, and
I have more than once made experiments, the results of which had been
published by me. 68
407
from his slumber at three the next morning, racing to the laboratory,
making an experiment and two hours later conclusively proving the chemical transmission of nervous impulse. So far, so good: another case,
evidently, of the pattern of subconscious creativity unforgettably described
by Poincare. But some years later, when Loewi, upon request, reported
all this to the International Physiological Congress, he was reminded by a
former student that, eighteen years before that nocturnal discovery, he
had fully reported his basic idea. "This," says Loewi, "I had entirely
forgotten. " 71
The psychologist Edwin Boring writes me of a colleague who came to
him in an excited Eureka frame of mind, announcing that he had just
worked out a new technique for scales of sensory measurement, and that
he is now hunting for a name for it. And then, before "the shine of the
new idea had rubbed off, he discovers that he had discussed this in print
some six years before and had even given it a tentative name."
And to advert to Freud, as I have so often done if only because his
intellectual experience is uncommonly documented, Jones reports several
instances of his "obtaining a clear insight which he subsequently forgot,
and then later suddenly coming across it again as a new revelation." 72 As
Freud noted in another connection, "it is familiar ground that a sense of
conviction of the accuracy of one's memory has no objective value." 73
If cryptomnesia is possible in relation to one's own earlier work, then
it is surely possible in relation to the work of others. And this can undermine the calm assurance that one has, in truth, worked out a new idea for
oneself when confronted with another version of the same idea worked out
by someone else.
Various contexts may affect the probability of cryptomnesia in relation
to one's own work. It may be the more probable the more the scientist has
worked in a variety of problem-areas rather than narrowly restricting his
research focus to problems having marked continuity. Looking at this
hypothesis, not in terms of the individual scientist but in terms of the
71. Otto Loewi, From the Workshop of Discoveries (Lawrence, Kansas: University
of Kansas Press, 1953), pp. 33-34.
72. Jones, Sigmund Freud, 3:271. One such case, for example, is Freud's conception of paranoid jealousy as an instance of repressed homosexuality.
73. This observation appears in his paper of 1913, on "Fausse Reconnaissance
('Deja raconte') in psycho-analytic treatment," Collected Papers, 2:334-41. This
same paper, devoted to paramnesia, has Freud reporting a multiple discovery and
assuring the reader (and himself) that it is just that, and not a case of cryptomnesia:
"In 1907, in the second edition of my Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, I proposed
an exactly similar explanation for this form of apparent paramnesia without
mentioning Grasset's paper [of 1904] or knowing of its existence. By way of excuse
I may remark that I arrived at my conclusion as the result of a psychoanalytic investigation which I was able to make of an example of deja vu ... [that] had occurred twenty-eight years earlier" (Ibid., p. 337).
408
409
logical Review for the same period witnesses a similar but even more
restrained trend, with single-authored papers declining from 92 percent in
1936, to 90 percent to 87 percent to 76 percent, and in the last five years,
to 65 percent. 75
Although the facts are far from conclusive, this continuing change in
the social structure of research, as registered by publications, seems to
make for a greater concern among scientists with the question of "how will
my contribution be identified" in collaborative work than with the historically d~minant pattern of wanting to ensure their priority over others in
the field. Not that the latter has been wholly displaced, as we have seen.
But it may be that institutionally induced concern with priority is becoming
overshadowed by the structurally induced concern with the allocation of
credit among collaborators. One study of a team of thirty economists and
behavioral scientists, for example, found that "the behavioral scientists
were apt to be less concerned about 'piracy' and 'credit' than economists.
This difference may be due to the greater emphasis on joint authorship in
the behavioral sciences than in economics." 76
For our purposes, the import of these changes in collaboration is, first,
that the degree of concern with priority in science is probably not an
historical constant; second, that it varies with the changing organization
of scientific work; and third, that these changes may eventually and indirectly help make for the dispassionate and methodical study of multiples
and priority in science, as resistance to that study is undercut by widespread recognition of the ubiquity of multiples in science.
Nevertheless, although scientists know that genuinely independent discoveries in science occur, many of them do not manage, as we have seen,
to draw the implications of this for their own work. For reasons I have
tried to intimate, they find it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to accept
the fact that they have been anticipated, or that a contemporary has come
to the same result just at the time they did, or that the others were truly
independent of them. As we have also seen, the values in the social institution of science and the penumbra of uncertainty that surrounds the
independence of thought combine to prevent the ready acceptance of
events that undercut one's assurance of unique originality, an assurance
75. The extent of these differences between patterns of collaboration in the major
scientific and humanistic disciplines has been investigated by Harriet Zuckerman; see
her forthcoming Scientific Elite (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, in press).
Bernard Berelson has found that for the year, 1957-58, among a sample of those who
had received their doctorate ten years before, the relative numbers of publications
with single authors ranged from 17 percent in chemistry and 30 percent in biology
to 96 percent in history and 97 percent in English. See Berelson, Graduate Education
in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 55.
76. Warren G. Bennis, "Some Barriers to Teamwork in Social Research," Social
Problems 3 (1956): 223-35, at 228-29.
410
born of the hard labor required to produce the new idea or new result.
Consequently, multiple discoveries are experienced at best as an unpleasant
reality and at worst as proof that deliberate or cryptomnesic borrowing
has occurred. The reasonably detached study of multiples and priorities
may possibly counter these tendencies to dismay or suspicion.
Such studies will probably not create the Olympian mood of a Goethe
vigorously reaffirming Ecclesiastes: "No one can take from us the joy of
the first becoming aware of something, the so-called discovery. But if we
also demand the honor, it can be utterly spoiled for us for we are usually
not the first. What does discovery mean, and who can say that he has
discovered this or that? After all, it's pure idiocy to brag about priority;
for it's simply unconscious conceit, not to admit frankly that one is a
plagiarist." 77 But multiple discoveries can be recognized as having their
uses, not only, as we noted before, for enlarging the likelihood that the
discovery will be promptly caught up in the advancement of science but
also for the individual discoverers. For, as we have seen Freud affirming
in an effort to rouse himself from his ambivalence toward having been
anticipated by Watkiss Lloyd, independent multiples do seem to lend confirmation to an idea or finding. Furthermore, even W. R. Hamilton,
tormented his life long by the fear that he was being plagiarized or by the
anxiety that he himself might be an "innocent plagiarist," managed on at
least one occasion to note, as did Freud, the secondary benefits of a
multiple, when, in an effort to dissolve his ambivalence, he wrote Herschel:
I persuade myself that, if those results had been anticipated, the learning [of]
it would have given me no pain; for it was, so far as I could analyze my
sensations, without any feeling of vexation that I learned that the result
respecting the relation of the lines of curvature to the circular sections was
known before. The field of pure, not to say of mixed, mathematics is far too
large and rich to leave one excusable for sitting down to complain, when he
finds that this or that spot which he was beginning to cultivate as his own has
been already appropriated. [And now comes his hard-won and, sad to tell,
temporary, insight:] There is even a stronger feeling inspired of the presence
of that Truth to which we all profess to minister, when we find our own
discoveries, such as they are, coincide independently with the discoveries of
other men. The voice which is heard by two at once appears to be more real
and external-one is more sure that it is no personal and private fancy, no
77. Quoted in the epigraph of Lancelot Law Whyte's The Unconscious Before
Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960). We need not mark the irony that the maxim,
there is nothing new under the sun, has itself variously recurred: remember only
Terence, beset by charges of wholesale theft, saying: "nihil est dictum quod non sit
dictum prius." Or five centuries later, Donatus exclaiming: "Pereant qui ante nos
nostra dixerunt." Or Shakespeare, in Sonnet 59:
If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil'd,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child!
411
412
The
Processes
of Evaluation
in Science
Part
Prefatory Note
The four papers making up this
final section represent not only the
extension of an interest at the
core of the basic paradigm but
a reaching out to examine the
ways in which additional variables
may interact with factors identified in the paradigm. Matters of
role performance (potential and
achieved) and of recognition
(instrumental and honorific) are
central to all the papers, with
attention focusing sequentially on
the consequences of accumulated
honorific recognition, the processes
through which such recognition
is acquired or denied, and the
relevance of age (biological and
social) to the preceding topics.
The first paper, prepared originally for a conference on
"Recognition of Excellence" and
published in 1960, considers
research questions important for
the general problem of how excellence is recognized and rewarded
or neglected and even penalized
in society and how the effectiveness
of these processes might be
increased. The viewpoint covers
role-performance in every sector of
society, but much of the reasoning
that went into the paper-and
the illustrative materials--come
from Merton's earlier work on the
topic within the context of the
scientific institution. It provides a
useful background for the more concentrated attention on science that
characterizes the following papers.
416
The connection between the first and second papers is obvious. While
a concern for ensuring that excellence be recognized within society animates
the former, it is the consequences of the accumulation of recognition specifically within science that forms the focus of "The Matthew Effect." This
paper, published in 1968, is the fruit of a longstanding interest of Merton's,
for there are references to the phenomenon in other papers at least as early
as 1961. Any reward system operating in society will produce an uneven
distribution of the coinage with which it deals, be this money, power, or
esteem, and it is always an appropriate question to inquire into the consequences of this fact for people and for the institution in question. Although
Merton does not draw parallels between the reward system of science and
those of the economic and political institutions, it is useful to recall that
they can be drawn-the rich tend to get richer in all three systems-even
though at times they have been overdrawn.
Although professional recognition leads to influence and can lead to
power, it appears less directly linked to basic life-chances than are money
and political power, and it is much more difficult to acquire through illegitimate means. Yet recognition is the coin of the realm, and within the
confines of science it is of supreme importance to scientists. The Matthew
effect points out that such recognition has a tendency to be self-reinforcing
(and that its lack can be negatively reinforcing) so that career-lines, in
terms of scientific success or failure, may come to resemble logistic curves
rather than straight lines. While indicating-and documenting-the dysfunctions of this pattern for individual scientists, Merton makes a clear
distinction between its individual and social consequences.
It is a difficult unsolved problem to compare the degree of equity in the
reward systems of science and other institutional areas. In science, according to the ideal norm of universalism, it is the quality of work, judged by
peers against the current state of the art, that should entirely determine
the kind of recognition received. One major institutional device for the
competent appraisal of the quality of scientific work is the referee system,
the subject of the third paper in this part.
In "Patterns of Evaluation in Science," Zuckerman and Merton first
contribute to our understanding of the process of institutionalization in
science by tracing the evolution of the referee system from its origins. They
then analyze the archives of the Physical Review, rather than only the
distribution of papers actually published in that journal, to determine
whether referees' acceptance or rejection of manuscripts is affected by
normatively extraneous characteristics of authors. The paper breaks new
ground by developing a sociometric analysis of refereeing: a statistical
matrix relating the status (age, reputation, institutional affiliation) of scientist-authors to that of scientists refereeing their papers. In the case of
Prefatory Note
417
this outstanding journal of physics, they find that "the relative status of
referee and author had no perceptible influence on patterns of evaluation."
A next obvious step is to compare the operation of the referee system
in various disciplines. The paper does not take that step, but after comparing the rates of rejection of manuscripts submitted to journals in different scientific and humanistic disciplines, it suggests that these differ
according to gross differences in the organization of knowledge. The general point, however, is not pursued here; instead the various functions of
the referee system as well as the problems inherent in its operation are
explored at length.
The authors might have noted an additional consequence of the referee
system. It is this editor's own experience, anyway, that a referee may often
acquire a sense of avuncular pride in a paper that he has approved for
publication and is thus more likely to draw upon it after it appears in print,
to cite it, and so on, than if he had not had the prior exposure to it. If,
further, referees tend to have a higher rank than authors (as is the case
with nearly two-thirds of the referee-author pairs studied by Zuckerman
and Merton in physics), this fact should have a small but positive influence on the visibility of those papers.
The last paper, "Age, Aging, and Age Structure in Science," also written
with Harriet Zuckerman, brings the demography of science into conjunction with its social structure. It was contributed to the project on aging
and society conducted by Matilda White Riley, Anne Foner, and Marilyn
Johnson under the auspices of the Russell Sage Foundation, and appeared
in 1972. In it is clearly demonstrated one of the advantages provided by
a tested paradigm: not only does it facilitate the "specification and organization of ignorance"-the systematic survey of questions posed by the
addition of a new variable to the matrix of what is already known-it also
sensitizes the scientist to a wide range of materials which are relevant to
the questions newly framed.
The authors describe this paper as more of a research prospectus than
a set of firm conclusions. But because it is based on a paradigm, it does
provide an indicative preview of what empirical research can be expected
to find. A concentrated attack on a problem that employs a set of interdependent hypotheses is of course more productive than one which touches
upon the same phenomena in an entirely ad hoc manner.
The factor of age is obviously relevant to behavior within the social
structure of science in several ways: affecting the stage of a scientist's
career, locating his peers in terms of career and of the life cycle, and
relating him to other scientists of different ages. Zuckerman and Merton
are not content, however, to explore only these questions. More systematically than in the preceding paper, they bring in attributes of scientific
418
19
"Recognition"
and
"Excellence":
Instructive
Ambiguities
1960
420
421
but go without the public notice due them in their own time. The accomplishments, and the talent or genius giving rise to them, have not been
"recognized"; they have not been accorded the esteem owing them.
The failure of recognition, construed in this honorific sense, represents
a special case of the general problem of appropriate public acknowledgment of great and middling achievements. To pin down this special and
possibly widespread type of instance, we might affix a special tag to it:
the elegiac sense of the lack of recognition. The gem is of purest ray serene,
but it is condemned to remain in the dark unfathom'd caves of ocean; the
flower has its sweetness, although this is wasted on the desert air. Too late,
we mourn our neglect of demonstrated greatness. The loss is chiefly ours.
Only secondarily is it the loss of genius expressed but unnoticed. Beyond
the loss, the guilt is also principally ours. We have not lived up to our tacit
obligation, as the recipients and carriers of culture, to signalize and to
honor genuine accomplishment. For the public recognition of great achievement constitutes one way in which we give expression to our cultural
values. It follows, then, that the failure to recognize such achievement
is an indictment of us. Preoccupied with our private concerns and with
lesser values, we fail to respond adequately to occasional greatness among
the men and women around us.
The honorific sense of the recognition of excellence and the elegaic sense
of nonrecognition shade over into the instrumental sense, through an interesting and informative assumption. Many of us assume that if talent and
genius of certain kinds go long unrecognized and unhonored, this will produce a world of values in which the potential of talent and genius will
increasingly go unrealized. A world unfriendly to poetic genius is a world
in which we find a mute inglorious Milton. Or as, in the early days of
modern science, Francis Bacon could complain and explain all in one:
... it is enough to check the growth of science that efforts and labours in this
field go unrewarded ... , it is nothing strange if a thing not held in honour does
not prosper.
422
shabby quarters given over to the humanities and the social sciences. With
the recent catapulting of physical science into enforced prominence through
the interworld-shaking drama of the Space Age, popular applause (and
popular attack) has become so noisy as to compare with the unmuffied
roar in modern amphitheaters of baseball and harness-racing, of football
and boxing. Of course, the applause directed to men of science and technology is often misdirected. For, as Bacon noted of his own time, and
unlike the public activities of sport, we, the people, are ordinarily not able
to make sound independent judgments of merit in scientific work. We mistake the readily observable feats of technology, the hardware of the Space
Years, for their less conspicuous but basic underpinnings in the sciences
that are thoroughly unintelligible to most of us. All this only highlights
one of the problems inherent in developing new systems of rewards for
accomplishment in science, in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, in
all activities making for the puqlic good. Who shall judge? And what criteria shall they use for their judgments?
Enough has perhaps been said to suggest how the two meanings of
"recognition"-the instrumental and the honorific-link up with distinct
though connected problems of research and action in providing for the
enlarged and appropriate recognition of excellence. By and large, the instrumental meaning directs our attention to the detecting of potentials for
excellence of achievement and to the providing of opportunities such that
these potentials more often become realities than they otherwise would.
The honorific meaning directs our attention to the signalizing and rewarding of demonstrated excellence. Honorific recognition presumably honors
givers as well as receivers. It expresses and demonstrates the donor's
soundness of values; in this definite sense, it is more blessed to give honor
than to receive it. In its assumed effects upon recipients who have demonstrated excellence and upon novices who have yet to show the stuff of
which they are made, recognition in its honorific sense merges with recognition in its instrumental sense. This is on the not unreasonable but still
untested assumption that arrangements for the public recognition of excellence will result in more young men and women of ability turning to the
pursuit of excellence. For, to transpose the Baconian aphorism into a more
hopeful key, it is nothing strange if a thing held in honor, prospers.
Excellence in the Sense of Quality
The double meaning of excellence has only been intimated in the preceding pages. Many of us are persuaded that we know what we mean by excellence and would prefer not to be asked to explain. We act as though
we believe that close inspection of the idea of excellence will cause it to
dissolve into nothing, much as the idea of simultaneity of two events some
423
distance apart came to nothing under the penetrating eye of a wise physicist. Yet we need not be and, perhaps fortunately, cannot be as penetrating
as all that. For immediate purposes, it is enough to note that two of the
meanings implied by the word excellence correspond loosely to the two
meanings of recognition that have been briefly examined.
Corresponding to the instrumental sense of recognition is the sense of
excellence as a personal quality. This refers to qualities of men and women
that are (or, in the judgment of the judge, should be) highly prized. The
quality must have found at least some minimal expression, for how else
could we infer that Jones or Smith "have" it. Indeed, it is the office of the
entire vast array of tests and measurements of aptitudes, personality, character, and the like to try to work out reliable outward indications of human
qualities that are not visible to the naked eye. The task is immense, and
work on it has scarcely begun. On this there is general consent, not least
among skilled and thoughtful makers of these tests and measurements
themselves.
Perhaps there are better ways of identifying these qualities of excellence
before they become so manifest as to be inescapable. Perhaps the pedestrian labors of armies of psychologists and statisticians will, in the end, get
nowhere. It is, of course, only a collective bet by a society which underwrites the large costs of these labors that this is one of the means-perhaps
the most promising means--of identifying talent early enough to provide
needed opportunities for its fullest possible flowering. Some of us refuse
to be party to this bet, particularly those of us who are appalled by the
unholy alliance between IBM and psychologists, and between them and
the consumers of talent in schools and in business, government, and
almost every other sphere of social life. But we should know that we can't
have it both ways. If we find all this pointless, and claim that in the multitude of tests and measurements there is no truth, then we might make it
our business to work for some better means for the early identification
of excellence. If, contrariwise, we adopt the second line of attack and believe that danger to man and society resides in the validity of these tests
and measurements, then we might consider how else special opportunity
for the development of these qualities can be provided. And finally, if we
reject the entire conception of special opportunities for talent as "meritocratic" or "undemocratic" and altogether obnoxious, then we might forthrightly acknowledge this and consider the further implications of closing
off special facilities from the talent that requires them.
Whatever our position on current methods of trying to detect qualities
of excellence as early as possible, we are driven back to the reasons for
wanting to detect qualities of excellence at all. Why not wait until quality
has become performance; capacity, actuality? As I have intimated, the
various reasons that have been advanced all seem to boil down to one; we
424
want to identify qualities of human excellence in order to provide the fullest opportunity for their effective expression and development. In a word,
the psychological research designed to identify human aptitudes of individuals has value for society only if it is coupled with sociological and
psychological research on the nature of social environments that evoke or
curb the expression and development of these aptitudes.
It is a matter of demonstrable fact that far more work by far more
investigators has been devoted to the problem of identifying individual
differences in capacity than to the correlative problem of identifying differences in social environments that evoke or suppress the effective development of identifiable aptitudes. This is not, I believe, the soured report
of a sociological chauvinist. After all, sociologists are plagued with more
subjects and problems requiring study than they are presently prepared to
cope with. They are not in avid search of new "fields" in which to labor.
But it is true that the great emphasis on studies of individual aptitudes is
not matched by emphasis on studies of social environments in which people
of the same or differing aptitudes live; learn, and work. Yet the psychological investigations on the first set of problems have little significance
for enlarging the fulfillment of individual promise unless it is connected
with sociological investigations on the second set of problems. It is only
so that we shall come to understand the frequent gap between individual
promise and individual achievement, between excellence as quality and
excellence as performance.
Excellence in the Sense of Performance
As you can see, I have not found it possible to consider the first sense of
excellence without touching upon the second. Excellence in the sense of
performance refers, of course, to the preeminent possession of some quality that has been demonstrated by achievement. If the first sense of excellence as quality embodies a doctrine of justification by faith in the individual who has yet to prove himself, the second sense of excellence as
performance manifestly embodies a doctrine of justification by works.
Enduring issues of the relations of man and the universe have a way of
cropping up in the most unexpected places: the concept of excellence as
quality is reminiscent of Luther, just as the concept of excellence as performance reminds us of Calvin.
The essential point that we all know but sometimes forget is that capacity and performance can and not infrequently do diverge. Each of us has
his own favorite examples of plainly talented people who somehow failed
to realize their promise and of apparently mediocre people who somehow
outdid themselves. Psychologists have recently tagged these as the "under-
425
Recognition as instrumental,
Recognition as honorific,
Recognition as instrumental,
Recognition as honorific,
excellence as quality
excellence as quality
excellence as performance
excellence as performance
426
427
less have a capacity for doing some things superbly well. In other words,
the talent scout might redress the occasional errors that are bound to turn
up in the mass measurement of human capacity. Above all, they might
counteract one of the biases, of unknown magnitude, that I believe to be
inherent in our system of locating excellence as quality and rewarding it.
This bias, if it in fact exists, condemns an unknown but appreciable number of able youngsters to oblivion, which is unjust, and loses to society
the fruits of the excellence of capacity, which is wasteful. Since considerations of morality and of expediency rarely coincide, we should seize upon
this seeming case of such coincidence for special attention.
The case of the "late bloomer" and its implications for recognition of excellence. That wise and good man, Alan Gregg, was to my knowledge the
only one to glimpse the bias in favor of precocity that is built into our
institutions for detecting and rewarding talent. He locates the problem by
first identifying four types of "emergent ability" which are severally related
to the "recognition of ability." (In "For Future Doctors" he is speaking
of medical men, but this, I believe, can be generalized to hold for all occupations.)
1. The rampart type of ability: this shows a rapid rise to an early maximum, and then a gradual slope downward after the summit is
reached. Or, more invidiously, up with a blaze of glory and down
with a dull thud.
2. The plateau type: also declares itself promptly but maintains itself
with steady continuity. Dependable, consistent performers, serene
and solid, beautifully free from bad luck or bad management.
3. The slow crescendo type: shows steady, slow improvement throughout his life; a slow starter, he creates neither great expectations nor
later great disappointment. He is apt to become the workhorse of
his community.
4. The late-blooming type: he manages to mix surprise with success,
since his ability shows itself so unexpectedly and so late as to excite
but little jealousy and few dependents to abuse his time.
There is something germane to our subject in each of these four types,
but I want to center primarily on the "late bloomer," for this type raises
some critical questions about the operation of our institutions for identifying and rewarding ability. Since the late bloomer is slow in getting started,
he is of course the type that is apt to be overlooked. This inherent oversight is all the more probable owing to the character of our social institutions, which put a premium on early manifestations of ability, in a word,
on precocity. I cannot improve on Gregg's statement of the case, so here
it is:
428
By being generous with time, yes, lavish with it, Nature allows man an extraordinary chance to learn. What gain can there be, then, in throwing away this
natural advantage by rewarding precocity, as we certainly do when we gear
the grades in school to chronological age by starting the first grade at the age
of six and so college entrance for the vast majority at seventeen and a half to
nineteen? For, once you have most of your students the same age, the academic
rewards-from scholarships to internships and residencies-go to those who
are uncommonly bright for their age. In other words, you have rewarded precocity, which may or may not be the precursor of later ability. So, in effect,
you have unwittingly belittled man's cardinal educational capital-time to
mature.
Gregg argues further that "precocity may succeed in the immediate
competitive struggle but, in ihe long run, at the expense of mutants having
a slower rate of development but greater potentialities." By claiming that
a slow development is significantly associated with greater potentialities,
Gregg may be assuming what he then concludes. But his argument cuts
deeply, nevertheless. For we know only of the "late bloomers" who have
eventually come to bloom at all; we don't know the potential late bloomers
who, cut off from support and response in their youth, never manage to
come into their own at all. Judged ordinary by comparison with their
precocious age peers, they are treated as youth of small capacity. They
slip through the net of our institutional sieves for the location of ability,
since this is a net that makes chronological age the basis for assessing
relative ability. Treated by the institutional system as mediocrities with
little promise of improvement, many of these potential late bloomers presumably come to believe it of themselves and act accordingly. At least
what little we know of the social psychology of the formation of selfimages suggests that this is so. For most of us most of the time, and not
only the so-called "other-directed men" among us, tend to form our selfimage--our image of potentiality and of achievement-as a reflection of
the images others make plain they have of us. And it is the images that
institutional authorities have of us that in particular tend to become selffulfilling images: if the teachers, inspecting our Iowa scores and our
aptitude-test figures and comparing our record with that of our age-peers,
conclude that we're run-of-the-mine and treat us accordingly, then they
lead us to become what they think we are.
What is more, I think it likely that the bias toward precocity in our
educational and other institutions that Gregg has detected has notably
different consequences for people in different social classes. The potential
late bloomers in the lower economic strata are more apt to lose out altogether than their counterparts in the middle and upper strata. If poor children are not precocious, if they don't exhibit great ability early in their lives
and so are not rewarded by scholarships and other sustaining grants, they
drop out of school and in many instances never get to realize their poten-
429
tialities. The potential late bloomers among the well-to-do have a better
prospect of belated recognition. Even if they do poorly in their school
work at first, they are apt to go on to college in any case. The values of
their social class dictate this as the thing to do, and their families can see
them through. By remaining in the system, they can eventually come to
view. But many of their more numerous counterparts in the lower strata
are probably lost for good. The bias toward precocity in our institutions
thus works profound damage on the late bloomers with few economic or
social advantages. And it is this group that our informal talent scouts can
perhaps help salvage.
I've dwelt upon these aspects of the instrumental recognition of excellence as capacity because they seem most neglected. These are problems
that psychological tests and measurements do not solve (nor are they so
intended). That is why I believe that we need new kinds of sociological
research centered on the social processes of current identification and selection of talent. At any rate, this is worth considering.
2. Recognition as honorific and excellence as quality
This refers to the problems of identifying not merely the capacity for
excellence but excellence of actual performance. At first glance, this would
seem to be something that takes care of itself. Unlike the not easily
430
observable capacity for excellence, demonstrated excellence must presumably come to notice. But it is precisely this assumption that should be put
as a question rather than assumed as a fact.
What kinds of excellent work go largely unrecognized, except, perhaps,
by the few who are the direct beneficiaries of that work?
As I have said, efforts to identify and reward persons who foster
excellence in others have long interested me. I am therefore apt to make
much of this hobby-horse and he may throw me in the process. But even
with as much restraint as I can muster, I still think it a subject of peculiar
interest to any enterprise for the recognition of excellence.
One kind of excellence that may be going relatively unnoticed is the
talent some people have for evoking superior or maximum performance in
others. I put it this broadly-evoking maximum performance in othersrather than more narrowly-evoking excellence in others-because this
seems to be the nature of the type. It is not only that he may be one of our
informal talent scouts who finds excellence and then does much to help it
thrive. Often, this type of person works even greater though less dramatic
miracles: they bring out the best in the people around them, including
those of distinctly small talent.
This hypothetical person might be described as a catalyst. (I suppose
that the term catalyst cannot be strictly applied, for I am persuaded that
he too undergoes some change in the process. But for want of a better
tag, let this one stand.) We all know of the catalysts of human worth, the
agents who accelerate positive growth in the people about them. A few of
us are lucky enough to have encountered one or another of them in the
:flesh. History, early and late, occasionally records their existence and their
undeniable role in the facilitation of others' accomplishments. Perhaps they
need to remain unsung heroes in order to do their self-chosen job. If so,
their honorific recognition might be self-defeating.
I refer, to take some cases quite casually-that is, as they happen to
have come to my attention-to people like Edward Marsh, or Isaac
Beeckman or Father Mersenne or Cardinal de Berulle. Marsh, to judge
from the just-published biography of him by Christopher Hassall, was in
no sense a genius himself but, as the reviewer Harold Hobson noted in
The Christian Science Monitor, "he was the cause, or the liberator of
genius in others." (One of these "others," whom one would have thought
needed little assistance in achieving his destiny, was Winston Churchill.)
Another evoker of excellence, in quite a different time and place, was the
seventeenth-century Isaac Beeckman, a mathematician of some ability in
his own right but notable chiefly for having seen and having called forth
in the young Descartes the mathematical genius not yet apparent to others.
Let's stay with Descartes for a moment, for he was the beneficiary of a
series of catalytic agents. After Beeckman, there was Father Mersenne,
431
432
and women these are, which of them had received public recognition fitting
their roles as evokers of excellence, etc. Perhaps we could find some of
these socially invisible men and women who do much to bring about the
excellence of performance by others that is publicly visible.
All this does not assume, of course, that these evokers of excellence are
known only within their immediate social circle. Some may be, and these
local eductors of the best there is in those about them, would be of
particular interest. But the rest, and these may tum out to be the large
majority, are cosmopolitans rather than locals, already recognized outside
their immediate locale. After all, Lytton Strachey, described by Clive Bell
as the sort of listener who leads one to say things worth listening to, was
scarcely without honor and repute in the world outside the tight little
Bloomsbury group. The case of Strachey reminds us too that the evoker
of excellence may also be the author of excellence in his own right. These
need not be mutually exclusive roles.
Consider only one other case of this double role, this time in one of the
sciences. The many contributions of John Newport Langley to experimental
biology which he made almost to the time of his death in 1925 were
enough to ensure him a lasting place in the annals of that science; this at
least is the judgment of C. S. Sherrington, a man who should know. But
beyond his own scientific discoveries, Langley was the source of discoveries
by others. His school of physiology at Cambridge was "remarkably productive of physiologists of distinction," largely owing, it appears, to his own
direct influence as a teacher in the research rooms. (As a lecturer, he was
evidently ineffectual.) And beyond this, in tum, he helped raise the calibre
of physiological work and of the reporting of physiological experiments
throughout Britain.
These people whose excellence of accomplishment is widely recognized
are perhaps apt to receive independent recognition of their capacity for
evoking excellence in others. But it may be quite otherwise with many
of those who create little that is publicly visible but whose hidden genius
consists in their being the cause, or at least the occasion, of bringing out
the best in the people around them. These, I assume, are the overlooked
men and women, though many colleges and universities provide for recognition of their "great teachers" who may not have themselves contributed to learning and science. And these, in particular, might be identified
by the dragnet of inquiry directed to the men and women who have
achieved acknowledged excellence.
Before leaving this subject, I should say again that it is an open question
whether these evokers of excellence should be given public recognition. We
should consider the possible consequences of putting them in the public
spotlight. Perhaps they want comparative obscurity and need it to do their
work. Perhaps a formal system of acclaim for these assumedly unsung
433
heroes would bring about imitations of the real thing. This would not be
the first time that public rewards, either in the market of money or the
market of prestige, have resulted in a multitude of imitations, in which
the outer appearance is substituted for the genuine article. This danger,
as I shall suggest in the next section, is inherent in every reward system.
But, apparently, it can be damped, if not entirely eliminated, by devising
systems that take this danger into account and counter it' in advance.
4. Recognition as honorific, excellence as performance
I shall raise a few questions about the assumptions and problems historically associated with formal systems for the public recognition of
excellence of achievement.
To begin with, there is the question of "unit" of achievement that is to
form the basis for judgment of quality. Is it to be a discovery, a paper,
a book, a painting, building, sculpture, or symphony, a notable achievement in keeping the peace or in ending the war? This principle of the
single achievement seems to govern the award of a Nobel prize in the
sciences. But in literature it is more commonly a person's life-work
that is being recognized. The question of what is to receive recognition
must be settled in every reward system, and yet the comparative merits of
the various criteria commonly employed are not altogether clear. This is
one question that deserves review.
Second is the question, What qualities of a seeming achievement are to
be judged? Is it popularity, orthodoxy, heterodoxy? The appropriate
answers to this question do not seem self-evident to me. Take the issue
of "orthodoxy" and "heterodoxy." Each of us can cite cases where later
history has reversed the contemporaneous judgment of the worth of
particular people and their works of heterodoxy. Much (not all) innovation is in the nature of the case heterodox, and we all know that the lot
of the heterodox innovator is often a most unhappy one. It is said that
when Hamilton developed his radical idea of quatemions, after having
won a recognized place for his work in optics and dynamics, he managed
to find just one mathematician who would take the idea seriously enough
to work on it. And Sydenham, probably second only to Harvey among
seventeenth-century English physicians, was never made a Fellow of the
Royal College of Physicians. And so on through an easily extended list of
instances in which true excellence went comparatively unnoticed or stood
condemned because it involved a great departure from reigning ideas.
But there is no joy or merit in escaping the error of taking heterodoxy
to be inevitably false or ugly or sinister only to be caught up in the equal
and opposite error of thinking the heterodox to be inevitably true or
beautiful or altogether excellent. Put in so many words, this is a commonplace wrapped in banality. Yet, not infrequently, people alienated from
434
435
436
437
scientist. His diary tells what it meant to him to be elected an F.R.S. at the
age of 26, by far the youngest of his competitors. It evidently provided,
above all, much needed reassurance that he was on the right track in his
work. It was "acknowledgement of the value of what" he had done. And
since, like many of the rest of us, Huxley was occasionally inclined to
think himself a fool and to doubt his own capacities, he concluded that
"the only use of honours is as an antidote to such fits of the 'blue devils.' "
When shortly afterward he learned that he was within an ace of receiving
the Royal Medal of the Society-he did get it only a year later-he went
on to say: "Except for its practical value as a means of getting a position
I care little enough for the medal. What I do care for is the justification
which the being marked in this position gives to the course I have taken.
Obstinate and self-willed as I am, ... there are times when grave doubts
overshadow my mind, and then such testimony as this restores my selfconfidence." The function of curbing acute self-doubts may be one of the
more significant results of effectively administered systems of public
recognition. 1
This matter of the appropriate timing of high honors has long been of
interest to scientists concerned to provide incentives for scientific work.
Take the world of science in France, just after the turn of the nineteenth
century. There were not many who would dare contradict the magisterial
Laplace on any views he happened to express, but Lagrange was one of
this courageous band. The two men-both, of course, Academicians of
eminence-are debating the merits of Fran<;:ois Arago as a prospective
member of the Academy. Laplace saw importance and utility in Arago's
work but regarded it as nothing more than a sign of. promise; Lagrange
takes it up from there:
"Even you, M. de Laplace, when you entered the Academy, had done
nothing brilliant; you only gave promise. Your grand discoveries did not come
till afterwards."
[Laplace turns from his own case to the principle he believes in issue:]
"I maintain that it is useful to young savants to hold out the position of member
of the Institute as a future recompense, to excite their zeal."
[The retort] "You resemble the driver of the hackney coach, who, to excite
his horses to a gallop, tied a bundle of hay at the end of his carriage pole; the
poor horses redoubled their efforts, and the bundle of hay always flew on
before them. Eventually, his plan made them fall off, and soon after brought
on their death."
The transcript of this dialogue may be less than verbatim, but it again
puts the question of the most effective timing of major awards if they are
to serve as incentives and as means of reassurance to people of excellence
who have yet to come into their own.
1. [On the same point, see chapter 15 of this volume.-ED.]
438
20
The
Matthew
Effect in
Science
1968
440
peers. Both the self-image and the public image of scientists are largely
shaped by the communally validating testimony of significant others that
they have variously lived up to the exacting institutional requirements of
their roles.
A number of workers, in empirical studies, have investigated various
aspects of the reward system of science as thus conceived. Glaser-3 has
found, for example, that some degree of recognition is required to stabilize
the careers of scientists. In a case study Crane4 used the quantity of
publication (apart from quality) as a measure of scientific productivity
and found that highly productive scientists at a major university gained
recognition more often than equally productive scientists at a lesser university. Hagstrom 5 has developed and partly tested the hypothesis that
material rewards in science function primarily to reinforce the operation
of a reward system in which the primary reward of recognition for scientific
contributions is exchanged for access to scientific information. Storer6 has
analyzed the ambivalence of the scientist's response to recognition "as a
case in which the norm of disinterestedness operates to make scientists
deny the value to them of influence and authority in science." Zuckerman7
and the Coles 8 have found that scientists who receive recognition for
research done early in their careers are more productive later on than
those who do not. And the Coles have also found that, at least in the case
of contemporary American physics, the reward system operates largely in
accord with institutional values of the science, inasmuch as quality of
research is more often and more substantially rewarded than mere quantity.
In science as in other institutional realms, a special problem in the
workings of the reward system turns up when individuals or organizations
take on the job of gauging and suitably rewarding lofty performance on
behalf of a large community. Thus, that ultimate accolade in twentiethcentury science, the Nobel prize, is often assumed to mark off its recipients
from all the other scientists of the time. Yet this assumption is at odds
with the well-known fact that a good number of scientists who have not
received the prize and will not receive it have contributed as much to the
advancement of science as some of the recipients, or more. This can be
described as the phenomenon of "the 41st chair." The derivation of this
3. B. G. Glaser, Organizational Scientists: Their Professional Careers (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1964 ).
4. D. Crane, Amer. Sociol. Rev. 30 (1965): 699.
5. W. 0. Hagstrom, The Scientific Community (New York: Basic Books, 1965),
chap. 1.
6. N. W. Storer, The Social System of Science (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1966), p. 106; also ibid., pp. 20-26, 103-106.
7. H. A. Zuckerman, Scientific Elite.
8. J. R. Cole and S. Cole, Social Stratification in Science (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1973).
441
442
size it, and the members of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and the
Royal Caroline Institute who face the unenviable task of making the final
decisions know it. The latter testify to the phenomenon of the forty-first
chair whenever they allude to work of "prize-winning calibre" which,
under the conditions of the scarcity of prizes, could not be given the
award. And so it is that, in the case of the Nobel prize, occupants of the
forty-first chair comprise an illustrious company that includes such names
as Willard Gibbs, Dmitri Mendeleev, W. B. Cannon, H. Quincke, J.
Barcroft, F. d'Herelle, H. De Vries, Jacques Loeb, W. M. Bayliss, E. H.
Starling, G. N. Lewis, 0. T. Avery, and Selig Hecht, to say nothing of the
long list of still-living uncrowned Nobellaureates. 10
In the stratification system of honor in science, there may be a "ratchet
effect" 11 operating in the careers of scientists such that, once having
achieved a particular degree of eminence, they do not later fall much
below that level (although they may be outdistanced by newcomers and so
suffer a relative decline in prestige). Once a Nobel laureate, always a
Nobel laureate. Yet the reward system based on recognition for work
accomplished tends to induce continued effort, which serves both to
validate the judgment that the scientist has unusual capacities and to testify
that these capacities have continuing potential. What appears from below
to be the summit becomes, in the experience of those who have reached it,
only another way station. The scientist's peers and other associates regard
each of his scientific achievements as only the prelude to new and greater
achievements. Such social pressures do not often permit those who have
climbed the rugged mountains of scientific achievement to remain content.
It is not necessarily the fact that their own Faustian aspirations are ever
escalating that keeps eminent scientists at work. More and more is expected of them, and this creates its own measure of motivation and stress.
Less often than might be imagined is there repose at the top in science. 12
The recognition accorded scientific achievement by the scientist's peers
is a reward in the strict sense identified by Parsons. 13 As we shall see,
such recognition can be converted into an instrumental asset as enlarged
facilities are made available to the honored scientist for further work.
10. This partial list of men who have done work of "prize-winning calibre" is
derived from Nobel: The Man and His Prizes (London: Elsevier, 1962), an official
publication of the Nobel prize-granting academy and institute, Nobelstiftelsen.
11. I am indebted to Marshall Childs for suggesting that this term, introduced into
economics by James S. Duesenberry in quite another connection, could aptly refer to
this pattern in the cumulation of prestige for successive accomplishments. For its use
in economics, see Duesenberry, Income, Savings, and the Theory of Consumer Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 114-16.
12. This process of a socially reinforced rise in aspirations, as distinct from Durkheim's concept of the "insatiability of wants," is examined by R. K. Merton in Anomie
and Deviant Behavior, ed. M. Clinard (New York: Free PresS', 1964), pp. 213-42.
13. T. Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951), p. 127.
443
Without deliberate intent on the part of any group, the reward system thus
influences the "class structure" of science by providing a stratified distribution of chances, among scientists, for enlarging their role as investigators.
The process provides differential access to the means of scientific production. This becomes all the more important in the current historical shift
from little science to big science, with its expensive and often centralized
equipment needed for research. There is thus a continuing interplay between the status system, based on honor and esteem, and the class system,
based on differential life-chances, which locates scientists in differing positions within the opportunity structure of science. 14
The Matthew Effect in the Reward System
The social structure of science provides the context for this inquiry into
a complex psychosocial process that affects both the reward system and
the communication system of science. We start by noting a theme that runs
through the interviews with the Nobel laureates. They repeated1y observe
that eminent scientists get disproportionately great credit for their contributions to science while relatively unknown scientists tend to get disproportionately little credit for comparable contributions. As one laureate
in physics put it15 : "The world is peculiar in this matter of how it gives
credit. It tends to give the credit to [already] famous people."
As we examine the experiences reported by eminent scientists we find
that this pattern of recognition, skewed in favor of the established scientist,
appears principally ( 1) in cases of collaboration and (2) in cases of independent multiple discoveries made by scientists of distinctly different rank. 16
In papers coauthored by men of decidedly unequal reputation, another
laureate in physics reports, "the man who's best known gets more credit,
an inordinate amount of credit." In the words of a laureate in chemistry:
"When people see my name on a paper, they are apt to remember it and
not to remember the other names." And a laureate in physiology and
medicine describes his own pattern of response to jointly authored papers:
14. Max Weber touches upon the convertibility of position in distinct systems of
stratification in his classic essay "Class, Status, Party" in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright
Mills, eds., Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946).
15. Zuckerman, Scientific Elite, chapter 8. The laureates are not alone in noting
that prominent scientists tend to get the lion's share of credit; similar observations
were made by less eminent scientists in the sample studied by Hagstrom (Scientific
Community, pp. 24, 25).
16. A third case can be inferred from the protocols of interviews, in which the
view is stated that, had a paper written by a comparatively unknown scientist been
presented instead by an eminent scientist, it would have had a better chance of being
published and of receiving respectful attention. Systematic information about such
cases is too sparse for detailed study. See Zuckerman, Scientific Elite, chapter 6,
passim.
444
You usually notice the name that you're familiar with. Even if it's last, it will
be the one that sticks. In some cases, all the names are unfamiliar to you, and
they're virtually anonymous. But what you note is the acknowledgement at the
end of the paper to the senior person for his "advice and encouragement."
So you will say: "This came out of Greene's lab, or so-and-so's lab." You
remember that, rather than the long list of authors.
experience with him, if he has published only together with some known names
-well, it detracts. It naturally makes people ask: "How much is really his own
contribution, how much [the senior author's]. How will he work out once he
goes out of that laboratory?"
445
The workings of this process at the expense of the young scientist and
to the benefit of the famous one is remarkably summarized in the life
history of a laureate in physics, who has experienced both phases at different times in his career. "When you're not recognized," he recalls,
it's a little bit irritating to have somebody come along and figure out the obvious which you've also figured out, and everybody gives him credit just because he's a famous physicist or a famous man in his field.
Here he is viewing the case he reports from the perspective of one who
had this happen to him before he had become famous. The conversation
takes a new tum as he notes that his own position has greatly changed.
Shifting from the perspective of his earlier days, when he felt victimized
by the pattern, to the perspective of his present high status, he goes on
to say:
This often happens, and I'm probably getting credit now, if I don't watch
myself, for things other people figured out. Because I'm notorious and when I
say it, people say: "Well, he's the one that thought this out." Well, I may just
be saying things that other people have thought out before.
In the end, then, a sort of rough-hewn justice has been done by the compounding of two compensating injustices. His earlier accomplishments have
been underestimated; his later ones, overestimated. 17
This complex pattern of the misallocation of credit for scientific work
must quite evidently be described as "the Matthew effect," for, as will be
remembered, the Gospel According to St. Matthew puts it this way:
For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but
from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
17. This compensatory pattern can only obtain, of course, among scientists who
ultimately achieve recognition with its associated further rewards. But, as with all
systems of social stratification involving differentials in life-chances, there remains the
question of the extent to which talent among individuals in the deprived strata has
gone unrecognized and undeveloped, and its fruits lost to society. More specifically,
we have yet to discover whether or not the channels of mobility are equally open to
talent in various institutional realms. Does contemporary science afford greater or less
opportunity than art, politics, the practicing professions, or religion for the recognition of talent, whatever its social origins?
446
Put in less stately language, the Matthew effect consists of the accruing
of greater increments of recognition for particular scientific contributions
to scientists of considerable repute and the withholding of such recognition
from scientists who have not yet made their mark. Nobel laureates provide
presumptive evidence of the effect, since they testify to its occurrence, not
as victims-which might make their testimony suspect-but as unwitting
beneficiaries.
The laureates and other eminent men of science are sufficiently aware of
this aspect of the Matthew effect to make special efforts to counteract it. At
the extreme, they sometimes refuse to coauthor a paper reporting research
on which they have collaborated in order not to diminish the recognition
accorded their less-well-known associates. And, as Harriet Zuckerman
has found, 18 they tend to give first place in jointly authored papers to one
of their collaborators. She discovered, moreover, that the laureates who
have attained eminence before receiving the Nobel prize begin to transfer
first-authorship to associates earlier than less eminent laureates-to-be do,
and that both sets of laureates-the previously eminent and not-so-eminent
-greatly increase this practice after receiving the prize. Yet the latter
effort is probably more expressive of the laureates' good intentions than it
is effective in redressing the imbalance of credit attributable to the Matthew
effect. As the laureate quoted by Zuckerman acknowledges: "If I publish
my name first, then everyone thinks the others are just technicians .... If
my name is last, people will credit me anyway for the whole thing, so I
want the others to have a bit more glory."
The problem of achieving a public identity in science may be deepened
by the great increase in the number of papers with several authors in which
the role of novice collaborators becomes obscured by the brilliance that
surrounds their illustrious coauthors. Even when there are only two collaborators, the same obscurant effect may occur for the junior who exhibits
several "inferiorities" of status. The role ascribed to a doubly or trebly
stigmatized coauthor may be diminished almost to the vanishing point so
that, even in cases of later substantial achievements, there is little recognition of that role in the early work. Thus, to take a case close to home, W.
I. Thomas has often been described as the sole author of the scholarly
book The Child in America, although its title page unmistakably declares
that it was written by both William I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas.
It may help interpret this recurrent misperception to consider the status of
the collaborators at the time the book was published in 1928. W. I.
Thomas, then 65, was president of the American Sociological Society in
18. H. Zuckerman, "Patterns of name-ordering among authors of scientific papers:
a study of social symbolism and its ambiguity," American Journal of Sociology 74
(1968): 276-91. Dr. Zuckerman will not demean herself to give these practices their
predestined tag, but I shall: plainly, these are instances of nobelesse oblige.
447
448
put your name on that paper or not? You've contributed to it, but is it better
that you shouldn't or should? There are two sides to it. If you don't [and here
comes the decisive point on visibility], if you don't, there's the possibility
that the paper may go quite unrecognized. Nobody reads it. If you do, it might
be recognized, but then the student doesn't get enough credit.
Studies of the reading practices of scientists indicate that the suggested
possibility-"Nobody reads it"-is something less than sheer hyperbole.
It has been found, for example, that only about half of 1 percent of the
articles published in journals of chemistry are read by any one chemist. 21
And much the same pattern has been found to hold in psychology:
The data on current readership (i.e., within, a couple [of] months after distribution of the journal) suggested that about one-half of the research reports in
"core" journals will be read [or skimmed] by 1% or less of a random sample
of psychologists. At the highest end of the current readership distribution, no
research report is likely to be read by more than about 7% of such a sample. 22
Several of the Coles's findings 23 bear tangentially on the hypothesis
about the communication function of the Matthew effect. The evidence is
tangential rather than central to the hypothesis since their data deal with
the degree of visibility of the entire corpus of each physicist's work in the
national community of physicists rather than with the visibility of particular papers within it. Still, in gross terms, their findings are at least consistent with the hypothesis. The higher the rank of physicists (as measured
by the prestige of the awards they have received for scientific work), the
20. This pattern of social functions and individual dysfunctions is at variance with
the vigorous and untutored optimism unforgettably expressed by Adam Smith, who
speaks of "a harmonious order of nature, under divine guidance, which promotes the
welfare of man through the operation of his individual propensities." If only it were
that simple. One of the prime problems for sociological theory is that of identifying
the special conditions under which men's propensities and the requirements of the
social system are in sufficient accord to be functional for both individuals and the
social system.
21. R. L. Ackoff and M. H. Halbert, An Operations Research Study of the Scientific Activity of Chemists (Cleveland: Case Institute of Technology Operations Research Group, 1958).
449
higher their visibility in the national community of physicists. Nobel laureates have a visibility score 24 of 85; other members of the National Academy of Sciences, a score of 72; recipients of awards having less prestige,
a score of 38; and physicists who have received no awards, a visibility
score of 17. The Coles also find that the visibility of physicists producing
work of high quality is associated with their attaining honorific awards more
prestigious than those they have previously received. Further investigation
is needed to discover whether these same patterns hold for differences in
the visibility (as measured by readership) of individual papers published
by scientists of differing rank.
There is reason to assume that the communication function of the Matthew effect is increasing in frequency and intensity with the exponential
increase 25 in the volume of scientific publications, which makes it increasingly difficult for scientists to keep up with work in their field. Bentley
Glass 26 is only one among many to conclude that "perhaps no problem
facing the individual scientist today is more defeating than the effort to
cope with the flood of published scientific research, even within one's own
narrow specialty." Studies of the communication behavior of scientists27
have shown that, confronted with the growing task of identifying significant
work published in their field, scientists search for cues to what they should
attend to. One such cue is the professional reputation of the authors. The
problem of locating pertinent research literature and the problem of authors' wanting their work to be noticed and used are symmetrical: the
vastly increased bulk of publication stiffens the competition between papers
for such notice. The American Psychological Association study 28 found
that from 15 to 23 percent of the psychologist-readers' behaviors in selecting articles were based on the identity of the authors.
24. In the Coles' study (see fn. 23), the term visibility scores refers to percentages
in a sample of more than 1,300 American physicists who indicated that they were
familiar with the work of a designated list of 120 physicists. The study includes checks
on the validity of these visibility scores.
25. See D. J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science. Price has noted that "all
crude measures, however arrived at, show to a first approximation that science increases exponentially, at a compound interest of about 7 per cent per annum, thus
doubling in size every 10-15 years, growing by a factor of 10 every half-century,
and by something like a factor of a million in the 300 years which separate us from
the seventeenth-century invention of the scientific paper when the process began"
(Nature 206 [1965]: 233-38).
26. B. Glass, Science 121 (1955): 583.
27. See, for example, H. Menzel, in Communication: Concepts and Perspectives, L.
Thayer, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Spartan Books, 1966), pp. 279-95; and in Arner.
Psychologist 21 (1966): 999. See also S. Herner in Science 128 (1958): 9, who
notes that "one of the greatest stimulants to the use of information is familiarity with
its source"; S. Herner, Ind. Eng. Chern. 46 ( 1954): 228.
28. Project on Scientific Information Exchange in Psychology, pp. 252, 254. Future
investigations will require more detailed data on the actual processes of selecting
scientific papers for varying kinds of "reading" and "skimming." But the data now
available are at least suggestive.
450
The workings of the Matthew effect in the communication system require us to draw out and emphasize certain implications about the character of science. They remind us that science is not composed of a series of
private experiences of discovery by many scientists, as sometimes seems
to be assumed in inquiries centered exclusively on the psychological processes involved in discovery. Science is public, not private. True, the making
of a discovery is a complex personal experience. And since the making of
the discovery necessarily precedes its fate, the nature of the experience
is the same whether the discovery temporarily fails to become part of the
socially shared culture of science or quickly becomes a functionally significant part of that culture. But, for science to be advanced, it is not enough
that fruitful ideas be originated or new experiments developed or new
problems formulated or new methods instituted. The innovations must be
effectively communicated to others. That, after all, is what we mean by a
contribution to science-something given to the common fund of knowledge. In the end, then, science is a socially shared and socially validated
body of knowledge. For the development of science, only work that is effectively perceived and utilized by other scientists, then and there, matters.
In investigating the processes that shape the development of science,
it is therefore important to consider the. social mechanisms that curb or
facilitate the incorporation of would-be contributions into the domain of
science. Looking at the Matthew effect from this perspective, we have noted
the distinct possibility that contributions made by scientists of considerable
standing are the most likely to enter promptly and widely into the communication networks of science, and so to accelerate its development.
The Matthew Effect and the Functions of Redundancy
Construed in this way, the Matthew effect links up with my previous
studies of the functions of redundancy in science.29 When similar discoveries are made by two or more scientists working independently ("multiple
discoveries"), the probability that they will be promptly incorporated into
the current body of scientific knowledge is increased. The more often a
discovery has been made independently, the better are its prospects of
being identified and used. If one published version of the discovery is
obscured by "noise" in the communication system of science, then another
version may become visible. This leaves us with an unresolved question:
How can one estimate what amount of redundancy in independent efforts
to solve a scientific problem will give maximum probability of solution
29. On the concept of functional redundancy as distinct from "wasteful duplication"
in scientific research, see chapter 17 in this volume.
451
without entailing so much replication of effort that the last increment will
not appreciably increase the probability? 30
In examining the functions of the Matthew effect for communication
in science, we can now refine this conception further. It is not only the
number of times a discovery has been independently made and published
that affects its visibility but also the standing, within the stratification system of science, of the scientists who have made it. To put the matter with
undue simplicity, a single discovery introduced by a scientist of established
reputation may have as good a chance of achieving high visibility as a
multiple discovery variously introduced by several scientists no one of
whom has as yet achieved a substantial reputation. Although the general
idea is, at this writing, tentative, it does have the not inconsiderable virtue
of lending itself to approximate test. One can examine citation indexes to
find whether in multiple discoveries by scientists of markedly unequal rank
it is indeed the case that work published by the scientists of higher rank is
the more promptly and more widely citedY To the extent that it is, the
findings will shed some light on the unplanned consequences of the stratification system for the development of science. Interviews with working
scientists about their reading practices can also supply data bearing on
the hypothesis.
So much for the link between the Matthew effect and the functions of
multiple discoveries in increasing both the probability and the speed of
diffusion of significant new contributions to science. The Matthew effect
also links up with the finding, reported in chapter 16 of this volume, that
great talents in science are typically involved in many multiple discoveries.
This statement holds for Galileo and Newton; for Faraday and Maxwell; for Hooke, Cavendish, and Stensen; for Gauss and Laplace; for
Lavoisier, Priestley, and Scheele; and for most Nobel laureates. It holds,
30. One of the laureates questioned the ready assumption that redundancy of research effort necessarily means "wasteful duplication": "One often hears, especially
when large amounts of money are involved, that duplication of effort should be
avoided, that this is not an efficient way of doing things. I think that most of the
time, in respect to research, duplication of effort is a good thing. I think that if there
are different groups in different laboratories working on the same thing, their approach
is sufficiently different [to increase. the probability of a successful outcome]. On the
whole, this is a good thing and not something that should be avoided for the sake of
efficiency." Zuckerman, Scientific Elite, chapter 8.
31. So far as I know, no investigation has yet been carried out on precisely this
question. At best suggestive is the peripheral evidence that papers of Nobel laureatesto-be were cited thirty times more often in the five years before their authors were
awarded the prize than were the papers of the average author appearing in the Citation Index during the same period. See I. H. Sher and E. Garfield, "New Tools for
Improving the Effectiveness of Research," paper presented at the 2nd Conference on
Research Program Effectiveness, Washington, D.C., July 1965; H. Zuckerman, Sci.
A mer. 217 (1967): 25.
452
in short, for all those whose .place in the pantheon of science is largely
assured, however much they may differ in the scale of their total accomplishment.
The greatness of these scientists rests in their having individually contributed a body of ideas, methods, and results which, in the case of multiple
discoveries, has also been contributed by a sizable aggregate of less talented men. For example, we have found that Kelvin had a part in 32 or
more multiple discoveries, and that it took 30 other men to contribute
what Kelvin himself contributed.
By examining the interviews with the laureates, we can now detect some
underlying psychosocial mechanisms that make for the greater visibility
of contributions reported by scientists of established reputation. This
greater visibility is not merely the result of a halo effect such that their
personal prestige rubs off on their separate contributions. Rather, certain
aspects of their socialization, their scheme of values, and their social character account in part for the visibility of their work.
Social and Psychological Bases of the Matthew Effect
Even when some of his contributions have been independently made
by an aggregate of other scientists, the great scientist serves distinctive
functions. It makes a difference, and often a decisive difference, for the
advancement of science whether a composite of ideas and findings is heavily
concentrated in the work of one scientist or one research group or is thinly
dispersed among a great number of scientists and organizations. Such a
composite tends to take on a structure sooner in the first instance than in
the second. It required a Freud, for instance, to focus the attention of many
psychologists upon a wide array of ideas which, as has been shown elsewhere (see footnote 29), had in large part also been hit upon by various
other scientists. Such focalizing may tum out to be a distinctive function of
eminent men and women of science.82
A Freud, a Fermi, and a Delbriick play a charismatic role in science.
They excite intellectual enthusiasm among others who ascribe exceptional
qualities to them. Not only do they themselves achieve excellence, they
have the capacity for evoking excellence in others. In the compelling phrase
of one laureate, they provide a "bright ambiance." It is not so much that
these great men of science pass on their techniques, methods, information,
and theory to novices working with them. More consequentially, they
32. Later in this discussion, I consider the dysfunctions associated with these functions of great men of science. Idols of the cave often continue to wield great influence
even though the norms of science call for the systematic questioning of mere authority. Here, as in other institutional spheres, the problem is one of accounting for patterns of coincidence and discrepancy between social norms and actual behavior.
453
convey to their associates the norms and values that govern significant
research. Often in their later years, or after their death, this personal
influence becomes routinized, in the fashion described by Max Weber for
other fields of human activity. Charisma becomes institutionalized, in the
form of schools of thought and research establishments.
The role of outstanding scientists in influencing younger associates is
repeatedly emphasized in the interviews with laureates. Almost invariably
they lay great emphasis on the importance of problem-finding, not only
problem-solving. They uniformly express the strong conviction that what
matters most~ in their work is a developing sense of taste, of judgment, in
seizing upon problems that are of fundamental importance. And, typically,
they report that they acquired this sense for the significant problem during
their years of training in evocative environments. Reflecting on his years
as a novice in the laboratory of a chemist of the first rank, one laureate
reports that he "led me to look for important things, whenever possible,
rather than to work on endless detail or to work just to improve accuracy
rather than making a basic new contribution." Another describes his
socialization in a European laboratory as "my first real contact with firstrate creative minds at the high point of their power. I acquired a certain
expansion of taste. It was a matter of taste and attitude and, to a certain
extent, real self-confidence. I learned that it was just as difficult to do an
unimportant experiment, often more difficult, than an important one."
There is one rough measure of the extent to which the laureates were
trained and influenced in particularly creative research environments-the
number of laureates each worked-under in earlier years. Of 84 American
laureates, 44 worked in some capacity, as young scientists, under a total
of 63 Nobel prize winners. 33 But apparently it is not only the experience
of the laureates (and, presumably, other outstanding scientists) in these
environments that accounts for their tendency to focus on significant
problems and so to affect the communication function of the Matthew
effect. Certain aspects of their character also play a part. With few exceptions, these are men of exceptional ego strength. Their self-assurance finds
varied expression within the context of science as a social institution. That
institution, as we know, includes a norm calling for autonomous and
critical judgment about one's own work of others. With their own tendencies reinforced by such norms, the laureates exhibit a distinct selfconfidence (which, at the extreme, can be loosely described as attractive
arrogance). They exhibit a great capacity to tolerate frustration in their
work, absorbing repeated failures without manifest psychological damage.
One laureate alluded to this capacity while taking note of the value of
psychological support by colleagues:
33. H. Zuckerman, Scientific Elite, chapter 5.
454
Research is a rough game. You may work for months, or even a few years,
and seemingly you are getting nowhere. It gets pretty dark at times. Then, all
of a sudden, you get a break. It's good to have somebody around to give a bit
of encouragement when it's needed.
455
456
457
propagation of heat had to wait thirteen years before being finally published by the French Academy Y
Barber42 has noted how the slight professional standing of certain scientists has on occasion led to some of their work, later acknowledged as
significant, being refused publication altogether. And, correlatively, an
experience of Lord Rayleigh's43 provides an example in which an appraisal
of a paper was reversed once its eminent authorship became known.
Rayleigh's name "was either omitted or accidentally detached [from a
manuscript], and the Committee [of the British Association for the Advancement of Science] 'turned it down' as the work of one of those curious
persons called paradoxers. However, when the authorship was discovered,
the paper was found to have merits after all."
When the Matthew effect is thus transformed into an idol of authority,
it violates the norm of universalism embodied in the institution of science
and curbs the advancement of knowledge. But next to nothing is known
about the frequency with which these practices are adopted by the editors
and referees of scientific journals and by other gatekeepers of science. This
aspect of the workings of the institution of science remains largely a matter of anecdote and heavily motivated gossip. 44
The Matthew Effect and Allocation of Scientific Resources
One institutional version of the Matthew effect, apart from its role in the
reward and communication systems of science, requires at least short
review. This is expressed in the principle of cumulative advantage that
operates in many systems of social stratification to produce the same
result: the rich get richer at a rate that makes the poor become relatively
poorer. 45 Thus, centers of demonstrated scientific excellence are allocated
far larger resources for investigation than centers which have yet to make
their mark. 46 In turn, their prestige attracts a disproportionate share of the
41. See chapter 14 in this volume; also seeR. H. Murray, Science and Scientists in
the Nineteenth Century (London: Sheldon, 1925), pp. 346-48; D. L. Watson, Scientists are Human (London: Watts, 1938), pp. 58, 80; R. J. Strutt (Baron Rayleigh),
John William Strutt, Third Baron Rayleigh (London: Arnold, 1924 ), pp. 169-71.
42. B. Barber, Science 134 ( 1961) : 596, reprinted in B. Barber and W. Hirsch,
eds., The Sociology of Science (New York: Free Press, 1962), pp. 539-56.
43. Quoted by B. Barber (see fn. 42) from R. J. Strutt, John William Strutt.
44. A subsequent investigation of the subject by Zuckerman and Merton will he
found in chapter 21 of this volume.
45. Derek Price perceived this implication of the Matthew principle. See Nature
206 (1965): 233.
46. D. S. Greenberg, Saturday Rev., 4 November 1967, p. 62; R. B. Barber, in
The Politics of Research (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1966), p. 63, notes
that "in 1962, 38 percent of all federal support went to just ten institutions and 59 per-
458
459
21
Institutionalized
Patterns of
Evaluation in
Science
1971
461
2. Leonard K. Nash, The Nature of the Natural Sciences (Boston: Little, Brown,
and Co.,1963), p. 305.
3. Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1946), p. 37. The evidence on the extent of agreement by referees has only begun
to be assembled, but indications are that it varies appreciably among different fields
of science and learning. We have found, for example, that in a sample of 172 papers
evaluated by two referees for The Physical Review (in the period 1948-56), agreement was very high. In only five cases did the referees fully disagree, with one recommending acceptance and the other, rejection. For the rest, the recommended decision was the same, with two-thirds of these involving minor differences in the
character of proposed revisions. In two biomedical journals, however, Orr and Kassab
found that for 1,572 papers submitted over a five-year period and reviewed by at
least two referees, "they agreed that a paper was either acceptable or unacceptable
75 per cent. of the time" (as compared with the 62 per cent. that could have occurred by chance) (Richard H. Orr and Jane Kassab, "Peer Group Judgments on
Scientific Merit: Editorial Refereeing," presented to the Congress of the International
Federation for Documentation, Washington, D.C., 15 October 1965). For one
journal of sociology, agreement to accept or to reject occurred in 72.5 per cent of
193 pairs of independent editorial judgments (as compared with the 53.9 per cent
that would have occurred by chance) (Erwin 0. Smigel and H. Lawrence Ross,
"Factors in the Editorial Decision," The American Sociologist 5 [February 1970]:
19-21 ) . Systematic comparisons of variability in the extent of agreement in referee
judgements would identify differences in the extent of institutionalization of different
fields of science and learning.
462
463
300 years ago within two months of each other: the Journal des Sravans
in January 1665; the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, in
March of the same year. The Journal was a conglomerate periodical which
catalogued books, published necrologies of famous persons, and cited
major decisions of civil and religious courts as well as disseminating
reports of experiments and observations in physics, chemistry, anatomy,
and meteorology. The Philosophical Transactions was "a more truly scientific periodical . . . , excluding legal and theological matters, but including
especially the accounts of experiments conducted before the [Royal]
Society. " 6
Although not the official publication of the Royal Society until 1753,
Transactions was first authorized by its council on 1 March 1664-65 in
these sociologically instructive words:
Ordered, that the Philosophical Transactions, to be composed by Mr. [Henry]
Oldenburg [one of the two Secretaries of the Society], be printed the first Monday of every month, if he have sufficient matter for it; and that the tract be
licensed under the charter by the Council of the Society, being first reviewed
by some of the members of the same.7
Much relevant information is packed into this summary of an organizational decision. Prime responsibility for the new kind of periodical is
assigned to one person, Oldenburg, for whom there does not yet exist the
designation of editor, to say nothing of specifying his obligations in the
editorial role. Before long, in trying to meet the problems of maintaining
the journal, Oldenburg, together with concerned colleagues in the Society,
introduced various adaptive expedients which ended up by defining the
role of an editor. The council also recognized the immediate problem of
having "sufficient matter" for this newly conceived periodical, and institutional devices were gradually evolved to induce scientists to contribute to
the journal. What is perhaps most significant here is that the council, as
sponsor of the Transactions, was involved with its fate and wanted to have
a measure of control over its contents. These adaptive decisions provided
a basis for the referee system.
6. J. R. Porter, "The Scientific Joumal-300th Anniversary," Bacteriological Reviews 28 (September 1964): 211-30, at 221. In this short account of the institutionalization of the referee system, we have drawn upon S. B. Barnes, "The Scientific Journal, 1665-1730," Scientific Monthly 38 (1934): 257-60; F. H. Garrison, "The Medical and Scientific Periodicals of the 17th and 18th Centuries," Bulletin, Institute for
the History of Medicine, 2 ( 1934): 285-343; D. McKie, "The Scientific Periodical
from 1665 to 1798," Philosophical Magazine (1948), pp 122-32; D. A. Kronick,
A History of Scientific and Technical Periodicals (New York: The Scarecrow Press,
1962).
7. Charles R. Weld, A History of the Royal Society, 2 vols. (London, 1848), 1:177;
see also C. Webster, "Origins of the Royal Society," History of Science 6 (1967):
106-28.
464
465
Soon afterward, Oldenburg writes to Boyle again and even more emphatically reiterates the function of this institutional practice:
This justice and generosity of our Society is exceedingly commendable, and doth
rejoyce me, as often as I think on't, chiefly upon this account, yt I thence persuade myselfe, yt all Ingenious men will be thereby incouraged to impart their
knowledge and discoveryes, as farre as they may, not doubting of ye Observance of ye Old Law, of Suum cuique tribuere [allowing to each man his own]. 11
Even before he became editor of the Transactions, then, Oldenburg had
occasion to note that men of science might be induced to accept the new
norm of free communication through a motivating exchange: open disclosure in exchange for institutionally guaranteed honorific property rights
to the new knowledge given to others.
In the course of looking after Boyle's writings, the future editor of the
Transactions came upon prompt publication as another device for preserving intellectual property rights. For, like other scientists of his time,
Boyle was chronically and acutely anxious about the danger of what he
described as "philosophicall robbery," what would be less picturesquely
described today as plagiarism from circulated but unpublished manuscripts.
Boyle felt that he had often been so victimized. 12 As his agent, Oldenburg
arranged for quick publication of a batch of Boyle's papers, writing him
reassuringly: "They are now very safe, and will be within this week in
print, as [the printer] Mr. Crook assureth, who will also take care of
10. Henry Oldenburg, Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. and trans. A.
Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, 6 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1966), 2:319, italics added. We have drawn extensively on the volumes of this correspondence, which provide an incomparable storehouse of information on the early
days of the Transactions.
11. Ibid., p. 329.
12. It will be remembered that so disturbed by plagiarists of his work was Boyle
that he prepared a document, later running to three folio pages of print, itemizing all
the ingenious devices for thievery developed by the grand larcenists of seventeenthcentury science. See The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. J. Birch, 6 vols.
(London, 1772), 1:cxxv-cxxviii, ccxxii-ccxxiv, and also Boyle's letter in Oldenburg,
Correspondence, 4:94.
466
467
Onely I could wish that those of our Nation; were a little more forward than I
find them generally to bee (especially the most considerable) in timely publishing their own Discoveries, & not let strangers reape ye glory of what those
amongst ourselves are ye Authors.17
Through these and kindred institutional devices, the new scientific
society and the new scientific journal persuaded men of science to replace
their attachment to secrecy and limited forms of communication with a
willingness to disclose their newly found knowledge. 18 But institutionalization is more than a matter of changing values; it also involves their
incorporation into authoritatively defined roles. As the organization sponsoring the Transactions, the Royal Society provided the power and authority which enabled it to institute new roles and associated rewards for
acceptance of these roles. True, in its early days, the Royal Society included
many members with little or no scientific competence. But, what was
more consequential for the process of institutionalization, it included all
English scientists (and many foreign ones) who were producing significant
scientific work. As a result, it was widely identified, both in England and
on the Continent, 19 as an authoritative body of scientists.
This authority based on demonstrated competence provided mutually
reinforcing consequences for scientists in their triple roles as members of
the Royal Society, as contributors to the Transactions, and as readers of it.
These consequences shaped the early evolution of the scientific journal and
the referee system in several ways. First, growing numbers of scientists
seeking competent judgments of their work turned increasingly to the
Royal Society. Thus the distinguished astronomer Hevelius wrote of his
important work Cometographia that "as soon as it is published I will make
it my first care to submit it to the high judgment and due consideration
of the Royal Society." 20 The French astronomer and engineer, Pierre Petit,
paid his respects to the "celebrated Society, to which judgment I submit
all my ideas." 21 Nor were these merely polite phrases. As the Halls observe, it was not long before the "practice of writing for publication in
the Philosophical Transactions" was greatly increasing among European
men of science. 22 This new practice of writing directly for publication in a
17. Ibid., 3:373.
18. Through the process of socially induced displacement of goals, this value of
open communication would eventually become transformed for appreciable numbers
of scholars and scientists into an urge to publish in periodicals, all apart from the
worth of what was being submitted for publication. This development would in turn
reinforce a concern within the community of scholars for the sifting, sorting, and
accrediting of manuscripts by some version of a referee system.
19. Hall and Hall, in the introduction to Oldenburg, Correspondence, 2:xxi.
20. Ibid., 2: 138; see also ibid., 4:448.
21. Ibid., 2:595. For other cases in which the Royal Society was asked to sit as a
court of scientific judges, see ibid., 3:6, 171, 219, 298.
22. Ibid., 4: xxiii.
468
469
470
developed more slowly. It took a century for the format of the scientific
papers to become more or less established and even longer for the scholarly
apparatus of footnotes and citations to be generally adopted. 29
Almost from their beginning, then, the scientific journals were developing modes of refereeing for the express purpose of controlling the quality
of what they put in print.
Patterns of Evaluation in the Sciences and Humanities
Turning from those early days to the present, we find that some version of
the referee system has been widely adopted. In the physical and biological
sciences, for example, a recent survey of 156 journals in 13 countries
found that 71 percent made some use of referees. 30
What, then, are the gross outcomes of the evaluation process by editors
and referees of journals in the principal fields of science and learning? Are
there pronounced differences among the various disciplines? Are observed
variations in outcome random or patterned? To explore these questions,
we have compiled the rates of rejections in a sample of 83 journals in the
humanities, the social and behavioral sciences, mathematics, and the biological, chemical, and physical sciences. 31 (The results are shown in table
1, with the disciplines ranked in order of decreasing rates of rejection.)
The figures exhibit marked and determinate variation. Journals in the
humanities have the highest rates of rejection. They are followed by the
social and behavioral sciences with mathematics and statistics next in line.
The physical, chemical, and biological sciences have the lowest rates,
running to no more than a third of the rates found in the humanities.
Confirming this empirical uniformity are subsidiary patterns of deviant
rates within disciplines which virtually reproduce the major patterns. To
begin with, consider the field of physics. The 12 journals had an average
29. Porter, "The Scientific Journal," p. 225; Derek J. de Solla Price, "Communication in Science: the Ends-Philosophy and Forecast," in Anthony de Reuck and
Julie Knight, eds., Ciba Foundation Symposium on Communication in Science (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1967), pp. 199-200, at p. 200.
30. International Council of Scientific Unions, A Tentative Study of the Publication of Original Scientific Literature (Paris: Conseil International des Unions Scientifiques, 1962). There are marked variations by country: for example, only 2 of 49
journals published in the United States, in contrast to 9 of 30 French journals, made
no use of referees.
31. A first list was drawn from Bernard Berelson's compilation of leading journals
in his Graduate Education in the United States (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960).
This list was supplemented by other research journals published under the auspices of
the major associations of scholars and scientists. In all, the editors of 117 journals
were queried by mail; responses were received from 97 of them and usable informa
tion from 83. The Physical Review Letters in physics and similar journals in other
sciences are excluded from this list since they are especially designed for "rapid publication." On the special problems confronted by such publications, see S. A. Goudsmit,
"Editorial," Physical Review Letters 21 (11 November 1968): 1425-26.
471
TABLE 1
Rates of Rejecting Manuscripts for Publication in
Scientific and Humanistic Journals, 1967
Mean
rejection
rate(%)
History
Language and literature
Philosophy
Political science
Sociology
Psychology (excluding experimental and
physiological)
Economics
Experimental and physiological psychology
Mathematics and statistics
Anthropology
Chemistry
Geography
Biological sciences
Physics
Geology
Linguistics
Total
90
86
85
84
78
70
69
No. of
journals
3
5
5
2
14
24
22
7
4
2
5
2
5
2
12
12
2
20
51
50
48
31
30
29
83
rejection rate of 24 percent, with the figures for 11 of them varying narrowly between 17 percent and 25 percent. But the twelfth journal, the
American Journal of Physics, departs widely from this norm with a rejection rate of 40 percent. In the light of the general pattern of rejection
rates, we suggest that this seemingly deviant case only confirms the rule.
For this journal, alone among the twelve assigned to physics in table 1,
is not so much a journal in physics as a journal about physics. It publishes
articles dealing primarily with the humanistic, pedagogical, historical and
social aspects of physics rather than articles presenting new research in
physics. Accordingly, it diverges from the relatively low rate characteristic
of the physical sciences in the direction of the substantially higher one
characteristic of the humanities and social sciences.
We find similar patterns within other disciplines. The two journals in
anthropology for example have an average rejection rate of 47.5 percent,
considerably below that for the other social sciences. But this is a composite of drastically different rates for the two journals. The American
Anthropologist, devoted largely to social and cultural anthropology, approximates the high rejection rates of the other social sciences with a
figure of 65 percent, while the American Journal of Physical Anthropology
with a figure of 30 percent approximates the low rates of the physical
4 72
473
manuscript for submission elsewhere or how they might improve on the present
study so as to do some publishable research.
And the editor of another journal with a high rejection rate of 85 percent
reports that about 20 percent of incoming papers "were so clearly unacceptable that I didn't want to waste a referee's time with them .... We still
get a flow of articles of a thoroughly amateurish quality."
The influx of manuscripts judged to be beyond all hope of scholarly
redemption testifies to the ambiguity and the wide range of dispersion of
standards of scholarship in the discipline, all apart from the question
whether the institutionally legitimated editors and referees or the would-be
contributors are exercising better judgement. We do not know the comparative frequency of these reportedly unsalvageable manuscripts in different fields but the testimony of editors suggests that it is considerably higher
in the humanities and the social sciences.
There are intimations in the data also that the editors and referees of
journals with markedly different rates of rejection tend to adopt different
decision-rules and so are subject, when errors of judgment occur, to different kinds of error. Editors and referees, of course want to avoid errors
of judgement altogether. But recognizing that they cannot be infallible,
they seem to exhibit different preferences. The editorial staff of high-rejection journals evidently prefer to run the risk of rejecting manuscripts
which the wider community of scholars (or posterity) would consider
publishable (or even, perhaps, important)-an error of the first kindrather than run the risk of publishing papers that will be widely judged
to be substandard. The editorial staff of low-rejection journals, where
external evidence suggests that the decisions of scientists to submit papers
are based on standards widely shared in the field, apparently prefer to risk
errors, if errors there must be, of the second kind: occasionally to publish
papers that do not measure up rather than to overlook work that may
turn out to be original and significant. Thus the editor of a journal which
rejects only one paper in five acts on the assumption that a manuscript is
publishable until clearly proved otherwise. As he puts it, "If the first referee
recommends publication, as received or with minor revision, that is usually
sufficient. If the first referee's opinion is negative, or undecided, additional
referee(s) will be consulted until a consensus is reached." Editors of another
journal in this class note that they "have generally published 'borderline'
papers-those on which referees' opinions differed." Put in terms reminiscent of another institutional sphere, the decision-rule in high-rejection
journals seems to be: when in doubt, reject; in low-rejection journals, when
in doubt, accept.
The actual distribution of these decision-rules and their consequences
for the quality of scholarship in the various disciplines still remain to be
474
determined. But even now it appears that the rules will have different
consequences for scientists and scholars at different stages of their development. The Coles and Zuckerman have found that collegial recognition of
the work of young scientists is important for their continued productivity. 33
This suggests that the discouragement of having papers rejected may be
more significant for the novice than for the established scholar. The multiplicity of journals34 need not entirely solve the problem for him. Since his
research capabilities still require institutional certification, it can matter
greatly to him whether his paper is published in a journal of higher or
lower rank. Rejection of his paper by a high-ranking journal might be
more acutely damaging, more often leading him to abandon his plans for
publication altogether.
Whatever their consequences, the marked differences in the rejection
rates of journals in the various disciplines can be tentatively ascribed only
in part to differences in the extent of consensus with regard to standards
of adequate science and scholarship. Beyond this are objective differences
in th~ relative amount of space available for publication.35 Editors of all
journals must allocate the scarce resources of pages available for print, but
not all fields and journals are subject to the same degree of scarcity. Journals in the sciences can apparently publish a higher proportion of manuscripts submitted tp them because the available space is greater than that
found in the humanities. Take the case of physics. The articles in journals
of physics are ordinarily short, typically running to only a few pages of
print, so that the "cost" of deciding to publish a particular article is small,
and the direct costs of publication are often paid by authors from research
grants. 36 The increase in available journal space, moreover, has been outrunning the increase in the number of scientists. The number of pages
published annually by The Physical Review (and Physical Review Letters),
33. Jonathan R. Cole and Stephen Cole, Social Stratification in Science (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1973); Harriet Zuckerman, Scientific Elite: Nobel
Laureates in the Uni~ed States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, in press).
34. It has often been suggested that papers which are at all competent eventually
find their way into print. See Tullock, The Organisation of Inquiry, p. 144; Storer,
Social System of Science, pp. 132-33; Warren 0. Hagstrom, The Scientific Community (New York: Basic Books, 1965), pp. 18 onwards. But only now are there
the beginnings of evidence on the proportion of papers published by journals of
differing rank which are first, second, or nth submissions for publication. See Nan
Lin and Camot E. Nelson, "Bibliographic Reference Patterns in Core Sociological
Journals," The American Sociologist 4 (1969): 47-50. Beyond this, nothing is known
about the use made of papers which have been published only after having circulated
through the editorial offices of several journals.
35. We are indebted to Dr. Jonathan R. Cole for suggesting this line of inquiry.
36. The effects of "page charges" to authors on patterns of publication in scientific
journals constitute a complex problem in its own right which is being studied by
William Garvey, Belver Griffith, Frances Korten, and the Center for Research in
Scientific Communication, at Johns Hopkins University.
415
for example, increased 4.6 times from 3,920 pages in 1950 to 17,060 in
1965; during the same interval, the number of members of the American
Physical Society increased only 2.4 times. Preliminary counts for the humanities and social sciences do not show the same disproportionate increase
in journal space beyond increase in the numbers of scholars. By way of
comparison, the number of pages available in the official journal of the
American Sociological Association remained about the same between 1950
and 1965, while the membership of the Association increased two and a
half times.
Observations of this sort deal only with the final outcomes of the evaluative process as registered in comparative rates of rejecting manuscripts
for publication. Of course this gross information tells next to nothing about
the process of evaluation itself. This we can examine in some detail by
turning to the scientific journal for which we have the needed archival
evidence, The Physical Review.
Evaluative Behavior of Editors and Referees
First, a few words about The Physical Review. It publishes 72 issues a
year (and two index volumes) in addition to weekly publication of short
research reports in the Physical Review Letters. It makes up 6 percent of
the world's journal literature in physics (together with the Letters, 9 percent). We can gauge the relative scale of this publication by noting that in
1965 The Physical Review itself-excluding the PRL-published more
literature in physics than all 53 journals published in Germany, once the
world center of physics. 37
All this quantity need not, of course, make for high quality. But it turns
out that in the 1950s, as now, The Physical Review ranked far ahead of
all other journals of physics in the extent to which it was used in further
research. Papers published in it were far more often cited than those
published in any other journal of physics and cited more often than if it
were simply holding its own-that is, getting the same share of citations as
its share in the physics literature. In such leading journals as the Italian
Nuovo Cimento, the Russian Journal of Experimental and Theoretical
Physics (JETP), and the Proceedings of the Physical Society of London,
the Review is cited far more often than these journals themselves: 38 36
percent of the references in Nuovo Cimento are to The Physical Review
37. Stella Kennan and F. G. Brickwedde, Journal Literature Covered by Physics
Abstracts in 1965 (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1968), appendix 2.
38. M. M. Kessler, Technical Information Flow Patterns (Cambridge, Mass.:
Lincoln Laboratories [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] 1958), pp. 247-57,
reporting data for the year 1957; and M. M. Kessler, "The MIT Technical Information Project," Physics Today 10 (March 1965): pp. 28-36, at p. 30.
476
477
total of 14,512 manuscripts were submitted (a little more than half of them
had a single author). In this report we deal primarily with the papers with
a single author, of which 80 percent were ultimately published. The sample
we have drawn from these voluminous materials is based, on a conception
of the stratification system of science as a distinctive compound of egalitarian values governing access to opportunity to publish and a hierarchic
structure in which power and authority are largely vested in those who
have acquired rank through cumulative scientific accomplishment. It is a
status hierarchy, in Max Weber's sense, based on honor and esteem. Although rank and authority in science are acquired through past performance, once acquired they then tend to be ascribed (for an indeterminate
duration). This combination of acquired and ascribed status introduces
strains in the operation of the authority structure of science, as has been
noted with great clarity by Michael Polanyi and Norman Storer. 42 These
strains may be doubly involved in the processes of evaluating scientific
work. In one direction, judgements by scientific authorities (whose status
largely rests on their own past performance) may come to be assigned
great or even decisive weight, and not simply because of their intellectual
cogency. In the other direction, judgements about the work of ranking
scientists may be systematically skewed by deference, by less careful appraisals involving less exacting criteria, by self-doubts of one's own sufficient competence to criticize a great man or by fear of affronting influential
persons in the field. Although based on status acquired through assessed
accomplishment, the hierarchy of excellence in science can militate in both
ways against the unbiased, universalistic evaluation of scientific work.
With this stratification system of science in mind, we have drawn a
sample of the contributors in the 1948-56 archives of The Physical Review
which is stratified into three levels of institutionalized standing based on
appraisals of past scientific work. In the first rank are all the physicists
submitting manuscripts who, by the end of the period (1956), had received
at least one of the ten most respected awards in physics (such as the Nobel
prize, membership in the Royal Society and in the National Academy of
Sciences). 43 These number 91 in all, with 55 of them having submitted
papers of which they were the sole authors. The physicists of the second
rank, although they had not been accorded any of the highest forms of
recognition, had been judged important enough by the American Institute
of Physics to be included in its archives of contemporary physicists. All
583 of the physicists in the American Institute of Physics list who had
submitted manuscripts to the Review during this period make up this inter42. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1958), especially chapters 6-7; Storer, Social System of Science, pp. 103-34.
43. See Cole and Cole, "Scientific Output and Recognition," p. 383, for the
prestige-ranking of awards by a sample of 1,300 physicists.
478
mediate rank, with 343 of them having sent in manuscripts of which they
were the sole authors. The remaining 8,864 contributors comprise the third
rank in this hierarchy. They are not included in their entirety but are represented by two successive 10 percent random samples, yielding a total of
1,663 authors, with 659 of them having submitted manuscripts of which
they were sole authors. 44
For some special analyses, we also identified a mobile subgroup in the
status hierarchy: the 49 contributors who were in the intermediate rank
during the time covered by this study but who later moved into the most
eminent stratum. In effect, these physicists were observed in the course
of their ascent, after having achieved a measure of distinction but before
receiving the highest recognition. It will be of interest to find out how the
system for evaluating manuscripts dealt with physicists whose work was
later to earn them great esteem.
The 354 referees who evaluated the manuscripts with a single author
submitted by our sample of authors were stratified in the same way, with
12 percent of them turning up in the first rank, 35 percent in the second,
and the remaining 53 percent in the third.
The sample of contributors and the derivative sample of referees were
designed with an eye to the general problem of the interplay between the
hierarchical structure of authority and the evaluation of scientific work.
More specifically, we want to examine the extent to which universalistic
and particularistic standards were utilized in evaluating the papers submitted to The Physical Review by physicists of differing rank. Since this
is our purpose, we shall limit our analysis almost entirely to papers with
one author, for reasons both substantive and procedural. Substantively,
it turns out that papers with more than one author, largely reporting experimental results, have so high an acceptance rate (over 95 percent) that
they can exhibit little variability in evaluations of the kind we want to
investigate. Procedurally, it is the case that the rank of the single author
can be unambiguously and realistically identified. But not so in the case
of papers by several hands, with their varying numbers of authors, often
of differing rank.
Drawing upon the samples of authors and referees, we want to examine
foUr main sets of questions. First, do contributors variously located in the
44. A first 10 percent random sample was selected from the physicist-authors remaining in the files after all cases of top-ranking and intermediate authors were removed. This sample of third-rank authors numbered 866, with 355 of them having
submitted papers which had a single author. Analysis of this first sample involving
three or more variables led to results sometimes based on small numbers. To check
these results, we drew a second 10 percent random sample of the remaining third
rank authors, this yielding 797, of whom 304 had submitted papers with a single
author. At it turns out, the results for the successive samples are so much the samethey vary by no more than three percentage points-that they are reported only in
the aggregate.
479
480
This, it might be said, is only to be expected. In general, the more manuscripts submitted, the more find their way into print. But this does not
mean, of course, that the ratio of submitted papers to published papers is
the same for the several strata of scientists. This would assume that scientists of every stripe adopt the same standards of what constitutes a paper
worth submitting for publication and that the refereeing process results in
uniform rates of acceptance for scientists at all levels of the stratification
system.
A first intimation that these assumptions are unfounded is provided by
the rates of submission and of acceptance for papers by physicists affiliated
with' the seventeen foremost university departments and with less distinguished ones. 46 Among the physicists submitting any single-author manuscripts at all, those in the leading departments submitted only slightly
more, with an average of 2.62 compared with 2.49 for the others. 47 But
when it comes to actual publication, not submission, the picture changes.
Some 91 percent of the papers by physicists in the foremost departments
were accepted as against 72 percent from other universities (producing
average acceptances of 2.36 and 1. 79 papers, respectively).
This result sets the general problem quite clearly. What patterns of
evaluation intervene between the submission of papers and actual publication to produce this result? How does it happen that the physicists from
the minor departments who are submitting almost as many single-author
papers as their counterparts in the major departments end up by having
s.ignificantly fewer of them published? The question is critical because
the gross empirical finding lends itself to sharply different kinds of
interpretation.
One interpretation would attribute the departmental differences in acceptance rates to the operation of the stratification system. It holds that
the work of scientists in the upper strata is evaluated less severely, that
these authors are given the benefit of the doubt by editors and referees,
because of their standing in the field or affiliation with influential departments, and that all this is reinforced by particularistic ties between authors
46. See Heyward Keniston, Graduate Study and Research in the Arts and Sciences
at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1959), for ranks of physics departments as judged by department chairmen in 1957.
To Keniston's top fifteen departments, we added California Institute of Technology
and Massachusetts Institute of Technology since technological institutions were not
included in his survey. There are no comparable rankings of the quality of industrial
laboratories or independent research organizations.
47. It should be emphasized here that these rates of submitting manuscripts do
not, of course, register actual differences in the "per capita productivity" of departments of different rank. Since they are confined to physicists who contributed at
least one manuscript to the Physical Review in this period, these figures take no account of the least productive physicists who are probably present in quite different
proportions in departments of differing rank.
481
and referees. This hypothesis suggests that the status of both author and
referee significantly affects the judgement of manuscripts, so that work of
the same intrinsic worth will be differently evaluated according to these
considerations of status.
Another interpretation would ascribe the different outcomes of the evaluation process principally to differences in the scientific quality of the
manuscripts coming from different sources. This hypothesis maintains
that universalistic standards tend to be rather uniformly applied in judging
manuscripts but that, on the avera~, the quality, of papers coming from
the several strata actually differs. On this view, scientists in the departments of the highest rank tend to be positively selected in terms of demonstrated capacity, have greater resources for investigation, have more
demanding internal standards before manuscripts are submitted, and are
more apt to have their papers exactingly appraised by competent colleagues
before sending them in for publication. On this hypothesis it is not a preferential bias toward the status of authors and their departments which
makes for differing acceptance rates by referees, but intrinsic differences
in the quality of manuscripts which in turn are the outcome of joint differences in the capabilities of scientists and in the quality of their immediate
academic environments.
We should repeat that although the two interpretations differ in their
conceptions of what goes on in the evaluative process, they are not contradictory in the sense that one necessarily excludes the other. 48 Both universalistic and particularistic standards might be concretely involved in the
actual process of evaluation, but to varying extents and in different parts
of the stratification system of science. We want to estimate the extent to
which one or the other of these standards is adopted and the structural
arrangements that make for use of one or the other.
It is no easy matter to disentangle these components of evaluation. The
standing of physicists in their field, the Coles have found, is highly correlated with the quality of their previously published work, as this is assessed
by fellow physicists on all levels of status. 49 This status, earned in part by
48. We note in passing that there seems to be a strong tendency to adopt one of
these interpretations to the exclusion of the other. The first interpretation seems congenial to those who conceive of the social institution of science as dominated by. influence and the exercise of power (decidedly not intellectual power), with the evaluative system having little to do with universally applied standards for judging validity
and scientific significance. The second interpretation seems congenial to those who allow no place at all for social exchange in the institution of science, with the system
of evaluation involving only the exercise of universal standards, subject to some
margin of socially unpatterned errors in judgement. We hazard the guess that amongst
those who seize exclusively upon one or the other interpretation, the first is more
often adopted by scientists in the middle and lower reaches of the stratification system
and the second, by those in the upper reaches.
49. Cole and Cole, "Scientific Output and Recognition," pp. 384-90.
482
483
rank, and 58 percent of the rest. As we shall see, it is the more problematic
papers which are sent to outside referees. All this has the immediate consequence that the higher the rank of the physicist, the more prompt the
decision taken on his manuscript (table 2), a matter of concern to many
scientists, especially those wanting to safeguard their priority.
TABLE 2
Duration of Editorial and Refereeing Process for Published Papers,
by Rank of Author
Rank of author
Higher-rank
physicists
Intermediate
physicists
Third-rank
physicists
Duration
(%)
(%)
(%)
42
47
35
45
11
20
29
41
30
(202)
(1027)
(972)
Total
SouRCE: This table and all subsequent ones are based on a sample of manuscripts with
single authors submitted to the Physical Review from 1948 to 1956.
484
485
Rank of authors
Higher-rank
physicists
Intermediate
physicists
Third-rank
physicists
(%)
(%)
(%}
Total
judgments
by
referees
Higher-rank physicists
36
Intermediate physicists
394
Third-rank physicists
653
All authors
32
44
24
1083
This suggests, although it does not demonstrate, that expertise and competence were the principal criteria adopted in matching papers and referees. That papers by distinguished scientists were assigned for review to
others of like stature need not mean, therefore, that an inner circle of
physicists were being asked to pass judgements upon one another's work
in a closed system of mutual support. The principle of expertise would
lead to such allocations just as it would to the observed pattern of referees
more often outranking authors than conversely.
In any case, we now know that the more highly placed physicists had
power disproportionate to their number in deciding what was to enter into
the pages of the Physical Review. How did they act in these positions of
power?
486
higher-rank
intermediate
third-rank
all ranks
225
1188
1331
2744
Manuscripts submitted by
physicists of different
ranks
78%
70
58
16%
24
25
higher-rank
intermediate
third-rank
6%
6
17
Manuscripts rejected
immediately
12%
higher-rank
intermediate
third-rank
Problematic manuscripts
23%
higher-rank
intermediate
third-rank
Manuscripts accepted
immediately
65%
higher-rank
intermediate
third-rank
12%
16
15
higher-rank
intermediate
third-rank
4%
8
10
CHARTl
Evaluation of Manuscripts with Single Authors By Rank of Author
90%
86
73
10%
14
27
higher-rank
intermediate
third-rank
Total manuscripts
accepted
80%
488
489
TABLE4
Rates of Acceptance of Manuscripts, by Age and Rank of Authors
Rank of authors
Age of authors
20-29
30-39
40-49
50+
No information
on age
All ages
Higher-rank
physicists
No.
%
96
95
80
80
58
87
Intermediate
physicists
No.
%
Third-rank
physicists
No.
%
91
89
83
83
77
73
50
71
287
519
236
126
385
440
79
14
All
ranks
No.
%
87
85
83
73
672
1039
373
227
61
80
423
2734
490
TABLE 5
Referees' Decisions to Accept, by Rank of Authors and Referees
Rank of Referees
Rank of authors
Higher-rank
physicists
Intermediate
physicists
Third-rank
physicists
All ranks
Higher-rank
physicists
No.
%
Intermediate
physicists
%
No.
Third-rank
physicists
No.
%
Total
judgements
by referees
No.
%
18
11
50
36
55
150
62
160
62
84
59
394
54
179
61
302
59
172
59 653
59 1083
(%}
Total judgements
by referees
(No.)
58
60
59
631
350
102
491
All this suggests that referees were applying much the same standards
to papers, whatever their source. This is confirmed further by patterns of
even-handed evaluation in the case of other relative statuses of referees
and authors. Referees affiliated with minor universities, for example, are no
more apt to accept papers submitted by authors from universities of similar standing than were referees from the major universities. And whatever
the academic rank of referees, it did not affect the rate at which they
accepted papers by authors in the various academic ranks. For this journal,
at least, the relative status of referee and author had no perceptible
influence on patterns of evaluation.
We may conclude that the status-composition of the physicists engaged
in refereeing manuscripts for the Physical Review during the period is one
thing; what the referees did in exercising their authority is quite another.
Functions of the Referee System
As the prime journal in its field, the Physical Review can be assumed to
apply exacting standards. All the same, the editorial and refereeing process
results in as many as four of every five manuscripts being accepted for
publication (a fair number of them, after greater or less revision). Does
this mean that referees are largely superfluous? Like other observers of the
referee system, 53 we think not. Referees, collectively engaged in sorting
out good science from bad, serve diverse functions for the various members
of their profession: for editors, authors, the referees themselves, and the
relevant community of scientists.
For the editor(s), referees serve their prime function in the case of
papers difficult to assess. At the extremes, as we have noted for the
Physical Review and a variety of other journals, papers are comparatively
easy to appraise and the editor ( s) can sort them out. Manuscripts which,
by the core standards of the field, provide sound, new, consequential ideas
and information, clearly formulated and relevant to the particular journal,
can be readily distinguished from their antitheses which are mistaken,
redundant, trivial, obscure, and irrelevant. But not all manuscripts exhibit
these neatly correlated arrays of intellectual virtues or vices. It is the often
sizable number of more problematic manuscripts which particularly require
examination by experts on their subjects. Apart from this manifest function
of furnishing expert judgement, the corps of typically anonymous referees
53. The operation of the authority structure in science and the social structural
basis of scientific objectivity have been most fully developed by Michael Polanyi,
notably in his Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958);
the discussion of the referee system is principally in chapter 6. See also, Ziman,
Public Knowledge, pp. 111-17; Storer, Social System of Science, pp. 112-26; Hagstrom, Scientific Community, pp. 18-19.
492
493
494
no one to tread on his heels, until at last, I think, he has come to look upon
the Natural World as his special preserve, and "no poachers allowed." So I
must manoeuvre a little to get my poor memoir kept out of his hands. 58
With all its imperfections, old and new, the developing institution of the
referee system provides for a warranted faith that what appears in the
archives of science can generally be relied upon. As Professor Michael
Polanyi in particular has observed, 59 the functional significance of the
referee system increases with the growing differentiation of science into
arrays and extensive networks of specialities. The more specialized the
paper, the fewer there are who can responsibly appraise its worth. But
while only a few may be fully competent to assess, many more on the
periphery of the subject and in other related fields may find the p'aper
relevant to their work. It is for them that the role of the referee as deputy
takes on special importance. When a scientist is working on a problem
treated in a published article, he can serve as his own referee. He may,
in fact, be better qualified to assess its worth than the official referee who
helped usher it into print. It is not so much the fellow specialist as the
others making use of published results in fields tangential to their own
who particularly depend upon the referee system.
Scientists also benefit from the refereeing of papers in their own special
fields but for somewhat different reasons. They may often be equipped to
test for themselves the substance of the papers on which they draw, but
to do so repeatedly would only subvert their motivation. The fun and
excitement in doing science comes largely from working on problems not
yet solved. The continuing rather than occasional need to recheck the
observations, experimental results, and theories advanced by others would
seem an excellent means for depleting creative energies. By providing for
generally warranted confidence in the research reported in accredited
publications, the system of expert referees helps scientists get on with their
own imaginative inquiries.
Editors of journals in many fields of learning remark, sometimes with
an air of puzzlement, upon the willingness of scientists and scholars to
serve in the anonymous and often exacting role of referee. In some fields
such participation is widely diffused. Almost 30 percent of a sample of
high energy theorists in physics, for example, had engaged in refereeing
and editorial work for journals. 60 A sense of reciprocation for benefits
received from the referee system probably supports the motivation for
58. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (London: Macmillan and Co., 1900), 1:97.
59. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 163.
60. Miles A. Libbey and Gerald Zaltman, The Role and Distribution of Written
Informal Communications in Theoretical High Energy Physics (New York: American
Institute of Physics, 1967), p. 49.
495
serving in the role of referee as it becomes recognized that the maintenance of standards is a collective responsibility. For young scientists
and scholars there may also be the further symbolic reward of having been
identified as enough of an expert to serve as a referee.
The very existence of the referee system, Dr. Simon Pasternack has
suggested, 61 makes for quality control of scientific communications. In part
this control works by anticipation. Knowing that their papers will be
reviewed, authors take care in preparing them before submission, all the
more so, perhaps, for papers sent to high-ranking journals with a reputation
for thorough refereeing. This would also make for the scientists' internalization of high standards. Furthermore, Pasternack points out, even the
"scientific journals that have little or no refereeing or editing . . . exist
within a framework of the edited journals, which set the pattern and the
standard." The referee system may thus be raising standards adopted by
journals ostensibly outside that system.
These observations on the functions of the referee system do not at all
imply the contrary-to-fact assumption that it works with unfailing effectiveness. Errors of judgment, of course, occur. But the system of monitoring
scientific work before it enters into the archives of science means that
much of the time scientists can build upon the work of others with a degree
of warranted confidence. It is in this sense that the structure of authority
in science, in which the referee system occupies a central place, provides
an institutional basis for the comparative reliability and cumulation of
knowledge. 62
61. Simon Pasternack, "Is Journal Publication Obsolescent?," Physics Today 19
(May 1966): 38-43, at p. 40 and p. 42. Dr. Pasternack has been editor of the
Physical Review since 1956 (which will be remembered as the end of the nine-yearperiod examined in this paper) and on its staff since 1951.
62. Several articles bearing on the subject of this paper have appeared since it was
completed. Most directly relevant is the work of Richard Whitley on the operation of
science journals. His study of an interdisciplinary journal and one in social science
found that in both cases editorial decisions on manuscripts were unrelated to the rank
and institutional affiliation of contributors. See Richard D. Whitley, "The Operation
of Science Journals: Two Case Studies in British Social Science," Sociological Review
n.s. 18 (July 1970): 241-58. In his study of 32 journals in social science, Whitley
found that the older journals and those devoted to fundamental rather than applied
science had tended, more than the others, to develop criteria for judging manuscripts. This is consistent with the hypothesis advanced in the present paper that
differences among the disciplines in rates of rejection are associated with the extent
of consenus on the criteria of adequate scholarship in the various disciplines. See
Richard D. Whitley, "The Formal Communication System of Science: A Study of
the Organisation of British Social Science Journals," The Sociological Review: Monograph No. 16 (September 1970), pp. 163-79. Whitley also found that the extent of
control by professional associations over the communication system in social science
was significantly related to the use of formal procedures for evaluating manuscripts.
(Ibid., p. 175).
Two studies based on surveys of journals in clinical, personality and educational
psychology report substantial agreement among the editors of these journals on the
496
criteria for judging the acceptability of manuscripts. Since these studies are not based on
investigation of the archives, however, they cannot determine the possibility of socially
patterned differences in the application of these criteria. See Wirt M. Wolff, "A
Study of Criteria for Journal Manuscripts," American Psychologist 25 (July 1970):
636-39; T. T. Frantz, "Criteria for Publishable Manuscripts," Personnel and Guidance
Journal 47 (1968): 384-86.
Bearing directly upon the findings on differences in rejection rates by journals in the
humanities and sciences reported in this paper is a survey of the importance assigned
to various criteria for good scientific writing by members of 16 departments of social
and natural science at a major university. The results indicate that "the harder
natural sciences stress precise mathematical and technical criteria, whereas the
softer social sciences emphasise less defined logico-theoretical standards." See Janet M.
Chase, "Normative Criteria for Scientific Publication," American Sociologist 5
(August 1970): 262-65. We owe the information in this footnote to Mr. Aron Halberstam.
22
Age, Aging,
and Age
Structure in
Science
1972
498
499
500
501
As with all social statuses and group memberships, 12 the status of "scientist" is not merely a matter of self-definition and ascription but also, and
more significantly, of social definition and ascription. It is not enough to
declare oneself to be a chemist or psychologist or space scientist; in order
for the given status to have social reality it must be validated by "status
judges," those institutions and ~gents charged with authenticating claims.
Licensing boards for many professions and specialty boards in medicine are
only the more visible and firmly institutionalized specimens of status judges.
The criteria for the status of scientists are typically educational attainment
("earned academic degrees") and role-performance ("experience").
Since formal education is typically confined to the early years in life, the
changing age structure of science is closely related to a concurrent educational upgrading of the scientific population. As Harvey Brooks has highlighted this trend:
A striking fact is that in 1968 the percentage of the age cohort receiving
Ph.D.'s in science and engineering and medical or dental degrees was higher
than the percentage of the corresponding age cohort that received bachelor's
degrees in science and engineering in 1920.13
This rapid change in the educational composition of the science population is a special and illuminating case of the. general rise in the level of
education. As Riley and Foner have noted, 14 the long-range rise in formal
11. United States Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, Statistical Ab
stract, pp. 65, 155, 525.
12. For a theoretical analysis of group membership and nonmembership, see
Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press,
1968), pp. 338-51; the concepts of status-judges and status-imputation are treated in
Merton, Status-Sets and Role-Sets: Structural Analysis in Sociology (unpublished
ms.) and in chapter 19 of this volume.
13. Harvey Brooks, "Thoughts on Graduate Education," Graduate Journal 8, no.
2 (1971): 319.
14. Matilda White Riley and Anne Foner, eds., Aging and Society, vol. 1 (New
York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1968), chap. 5.
FIGURE 1
Comparative Age Structure: Scientific Personnel and Total Employed Personnel, United States
A.
40
--A r~~tructure
ftl
36
32
oft;aft
---A< e SfruClu e
of empl yed perso s
28
24
1----
20
---
----
16
12
8
4
0
24
and under
2534
35-44
45-54
55-64
65+
B. PH Ds IN SCIENCE
40
- A le structu le
or nu1 m sc1ence
36
32
--A le
of emDI
28
24
s~~~tur
rso
lved
----1----
20
16
1-----
12
8
4
0
24
and under
25-34
35-44
45-54
55-64
65+
Age
503
education for the population at large has meant that, at any given time,
older people are educationally disadvantaged in comparison with younger
ones. In the special case of science, we deal of course with the uppermost
reaches of the educational distribution, and this introduces distinctive
complexities. It may not be so much the social change in the level of
attained education but the cultural change in the extent and character of
scientific knowledge that presents the age cohorts of scientists with distinctive ranges of difficulties and opportunities. All this may lead to
problems of career obsolescence and kindred difficulties for scientists in
their life course. It also introduces various problems for the social organization of science; for example:
Query: How do the social and cultural changes in the education of
scientists and in the growth of scientific knowledge affect the
working relations between cohorts of scientists? Do they make
for social cleavage and discontinuity between them? What social
mechanisms, if any, bind the cohorts together and make for
continuity in scientific development?
Thus the changing age and educational structure of science is congruent
with the self-image, prevalent among scientists, that pictures "science as a
young man's game." But this expression, repeated on every side by scientists young and old, does not refer primarily to the age (or sex) distribution
of scientists. Rather, it only announces a widespread belief that the best
work in science is done at a comparatively early age. This posited linkage
between age and significant productivity is still the focus of the little
research that has been done on age stratification in science, and we shall be
examining that research in detail. But here, the imagery of science as the
prerogative of the young generates another kind of sociological question,
this one dealing with the linkages between age structure, prevalent values,
and social organization.
Query: How do the age structures of occupations and their component
specialties relate to age-connected values (for example, youth
as asset or liability)? How do they relate also to other forms of
stratification within the occupation (for example, allocation of
authority-statuses and roles, of rewards, and so forth)?
Age and education in the component sciences
Turning from science in the large to the constituent sciences, we find that
the median age of their personnel varies considerably, as appears in
table 1. These divergences reflect sociologically interesting differences in
the social definitions of boundaries of disciplines and of criteria for
admission into them. In part, the age differences in the various science
504
TABLE 1
Median Age of Ph.D's in Selected Science Fields
Field
All scientific fields
Mathematics
Physics
Chemistry
Biological sciences
Psychology
Sociology
Median
age a
41.2
38.2
38.3
41.0
41.8
42.2
44.1
SouRCE: National Science Foundation, American Science Manpower 1968, pp. 50 ff. (adapted).
Nom: When medians are computed for all personnel, with or without the Ph.D., the rank
order is roughly similar except that sociology rises to third place.
a Computed from grouped data by straight line interpolation.
505
TABLE 2
Percentages of Scientists Holding Doctorates, According to
Fields of Science, United States, 1968
Field
Anthropology
Psychology
Linguistics
Political science
Economics
Sociology
Biological sciences
Physics
Statistics
Chemistry
Mathematics
Earth and Marine Sciences
Agricultural sciences
Atmospheric and space sciences
Computer sciences
All fields
Percentage
holding
doctorate
95
64
62
59
53
51
48
44
35
31
28
21
18
9
7
37
SouRcE: National Science Foundation, American Science Manpower 1968, adapted from
table, p. 23.
506
Such equilibrium growth rates have direct consequences for the age and
opportunity structures of science, as Martino has indicated. 21 A direct
consequence, of course, is an increase in the median age of scientists.
Slackened increase in resources will mean fewer new research installations
and new departments in new universities. In due course, the age structure
of research groups will probably change with possible consequences for
their productivity. 22 The rate of increase in the volume of scientific
publication will tend to diminish. But if Weiss and Ziman are correct in
suggesting that the proliferation of scientists and the big expansion in
funds for research have resulted in an even more rapid proliferation of
trivial research and trivial publications, 23 this decline in volume of publication need not mean a corresponding decline in the growth of knowledge.
Finally, since the various changes do not occur uniformly in the individual
sciences, the relative rates of development of long established and newly
emerging disciplines will probably continue to differ. 24
507
508
509
510
We begin with the premise that up to a given age, older and more experienced scientists have an edge on their much younger colleagues in the
opportunities for discovery. After all, they know the field as the novice
does not. What needs to be explained, in our view, is not so much discovery by experienced and knowledgeable elders as discovery by newly trained
youth. In this connection, we need to ask whether discovery by young
scientists is more frequent in some sciences and, if so, how this comes to be.
Codification facilitates mastery of a field by linking basic ideas in a
theoretical framework and by reducing the volume of factual information
that is required in order to do significant research. This should lead scientists in the more codified fields to qualify earlier33 for work at the research
front-at least, as collaborators of more mature investigators. And early
achievement in science may give an enduring advantage by providing both
increasingly abundant facilities for research and early access to the social
networks of scientists at the research front where information and criticism
are exchanged and motivation for getting on with one's work is maintained.34 The best-known because heavily publicized specimen of this
process is that of the twenty-five-year-old James D. Watson35 soon finding
his way into the center of work on the structure of DNA once he was
sponsored by his intellectually influential teachers, Salvador Luria and Max
Delbrlick. In this process, intellectual mobility and social mobility (of a
jointly sponsored and contest variety) are mutually reinforcing.
The organization of scientific inquiry and of training in science also
promotes early entrance into the research role. In a sense, young scientists
are more apt than their expert teachers to be abreast of the range of knowledge in their field. Since advanced research in science demands concentration on a narrow range of problems at hand, the established specialist
experts, intent on moving ahead with their own research, tend to fall be33. This early start may also reflect early recruitment to the more codified
sciences. We know of no data on the matter but share the widespread impression that
decisions to go into mathematics and physics are made much earlier than decisions
to enter the soft sciences. The significance of age at time of the decision to enter the
field of medicine is examined by Natalie Rogoff, "The Decision to Study Medicine,"
in Robert K. Merton, George G. Reader, and Patricia Kendall, eds., The StudentPhysician (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), and by Wagner
Thielens, Jr., "Some Comparisons of Entrants to Medical and Law School," in ibid.,
pp. 109-22 and 131-52.
34. See the informed and astute account of how young scientists achieve entry
into the "Invisible College" of their specialty by the physicist and sociologist of
science, John Ziman, in Public Knowledge: The Social Dimension of Science (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1968 ), pp. 130--34.
35. Watson's detailed account of how all this worked out for him is one of the
many features of The Double Helix that make it an unexampled personal document
in the sociology of science. See The Double Helix: Being a Personal Account of the
Discovery of the Structure of DNA (New York: Atheneum Press, 1968).
511
hind on what others are doing outside their own special fields. But, at
least in the best departments, students are trained by an aggregate of specialists at work on the research front of their specialties. This brings them
up to date, if only for a time, in a wider variety of fields than their older
and temporarily more specialized teachers.
This pattern we believe to hold in all the sciences, but we suspect that
it is more marked and efficacious in the more highly codified ones, those
that provide more powerful means for acquiring competence in current
knowledge. The opportunity structure confers two advantages on the
young in the more codified fields: the chance to begin research early as
qualified junior colleagues and the chance to have training that is both upto-date and relatively diversified. Both should advance their opportunities for making significant research contributions early in their careers.
It is from this standpoint that we come upon the one problem that has
almost monopolized discussions of the, in fact, multiform connections
between age and scientific activity: the time of life at which scientists do
their most important work or, as it is sometimes put, the relations between
age and scientific productivity. The data bearing on this subject are faulty
or severely limited but, on first inspection, they seem to confirm our expectations. Various investigators report lower median ages for discoverers in
physics and chemistry than in the more descriptive biological sciences,
with these being lower in tum than in the behavioral sciences.36 Nobel
laureates in physics, for example, were on the average 36 at the time of
doing their prize-winning work; laureates in chemistry, 38; and those in
medicine and physiology, 41. 37 This does not mean, of course, that a higher
rate of discovery in youth is the norm in the more codified sciences, much
less for them all. Apparently, we sometimes need to be reminded that
median ages at time of discovery tell us that half of the discoveries were
made after the median age as well as before. In contrast to the usual emphasis, Lehman's findings could be reported, for example, as indicating
that "fully half" of the discoveries listed in Magie's Source Book of Physics
were made by scientists over the age of 38 or that "fully half" of the discoveries listed in genetics were by scientists over 40.
Beyond this, we need only mention other caveats in the use of these
data on age and scientific achievements. They are faulty in two basic respects. First, they do not take into account the age structure of the scientific
36. See H. C. Lehman, "The Creative Years in Science and Literature," Scientific
Monthly 43 (1936): 162, and Age and Achievement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 20; C. W. Adams, "The Age at which Scientists Do Their Best
Work," Isis 36 (1946): 116-69.
37. Data for 1901-50 are drawn from E. Manniche and G. Falk, "Age and the
Nobel Prize," Behavioral Science 2 (1957): 301-7, and for the period 1951-69 from
Harriet Zuckerman, Scientific Elite: Studies of Nobel Laureates in the United States
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, in press).
512
513
is completed during their first decade of work. This sort of thing can thus
foster the illusion that good mathematicians die young but that, say, good
sociologists linger on forever. 39
To this point, we have centered on differentials in rates of scientific
contributions by age-strata in sciences codified in varying degree. We have
now to touch upon the further question whether the truly transforming
ideas in science, the fundamental reconceptualizations, are more apt to be
the work of youthful minds rather than older ones. T. S. Kuhn, in his
vastly influential book on scientific revolutions, suggests that creators of
fundamental new paradigms are almost always young or very new to the
field. 40 A long and familiar roster of cases can be provided to illustrate his
suggestion. Newton wrote of himself that at 24, when he had begun his
work on universal gravitation, and the calculus and the theory of colors:
"I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded Mathematics
and Philosophy more than at any time since." Darwin was 22 at the time
of the Beagle voyage and 29 when he formulated the essentials of natural
selection. Einstein was 26 in the year of three of his great contributions,
among them the special theory of relativity; and finally, eight of the ten
physicists generally regarded as having produced quantum physics were
under the age of 30 when they made their contributions to that scientific
revolution.41
Arresting illustrations of this kind are of course not enough to show
that young scientists are especially apt to revolutionize scientific thought.
But in the absence of systematic data on the age composition of scientists
in various historical periods, they remain the basis for the generalization
being widely accepted as commonplace. Yet, as Kuhn himself goes on to
say, it is a generalization that "badly needs systematic investigation."
39. It will be noted that this gives special meaning to the old adage that "science
is a young man's game," which, plainly, should now be coupled with the ostensibly
older adage that "history is an old man's game" (as Robert Graves, in his I, Claudius,
has the Roman historian Caius Asinius Pollio saying). However, the crisp literary
contrast drawn in these coupled aphorisms should not be allowed to obscure the
quantitative contrast drawn in our argument. Still, we can illustrate our argument in
part by recalling that "the Nestor of historians" in the nineteenth century, Leopold
von Ranke, did much of his most important work while in his fifties, sixties, and
seventies, setting out in his eighty-sixth year "on his life-long ambition to write a
world history," just as the Nestor of historians in the twentieth century, Friedrich
Meinicke wrote two of his most important treatises-Die Idee der Staatsriison and
Die Entstehung des Historismus-while in his sixties and seventies, reserving the, for
him, significant but comparatively minor work, The German Catastrophe (1946) for
his eighty-fifth year. On Ranke and Meinicke, see Fritz Stern, The Varieties of History, rev. ed. (New York: World Publishing Co., 1972), pp. 55, 267-68; on a
Nestor among Nobel laureates in science whose work during his seventies and eighties
was of secondary importance, see page 530 in this chapter.
40. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 89-90.
41. George Gamow, Thirty Years that Shook Physics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966).
514
515
not exhibit the same citation behavior as their less distinguished age peers.
They appear to be just as responsive to new research as men thirty years
their junior, with 73 percent of their references being to the most recent
literature. This finding bears only tangentially on the Planck doctrine but
it does suggest that attentiveness to new developments in science is stratified by both age and scientific achievement.
Substantive differences in judgments of what constitutes important work
may crystallize, as Hagstrom has noted, into "generational disputes." But,
as he goes on to say, "even if some disputes are generational, they need
not be simply 'innovative youth' versus 'conservative age.' Rather, the
outlook of a generation is strongly influenced by events occurring when
its members embark upon their careers. Age may be more radical than
youth." 45
The evidence on age differentials in receptivity to new ideas in science
remains thin. and uncertain. But should further investigation find, as the
widespread belief has it, that older scientists are indeed more resistant to
new ideas, that would only raise a series of questions of how that comes
to be. It would not follow, for example, that it results from physiological
aging or senescence. 46 As Barber has noted in this context, aging "is an
omnibus term which actually covers a variety of social and cultural sources
of resistance." He goes on to suggest several possible social and cultural
components in such resistance:
As a scientist gets older he is more likely to be restricted in his response to
innovation by his substantive and methodological preconceptions and by his
other cultural accumulations; he is more likely to have high professional standing, to have specialized interests, to be a member or official of an established
organization, and to be associated with a "school." The likelihood of all these
things increases with the passage of time, and so the older scientist, just by
living longer, is more likely to acquire a cultural and social incubus. But this
is not always so, and the older workers in science are often the most ardent
champions of innovation.47
This provides in effect, a formidable agenda for investigation of ageassociated differences in receptivity and resistance to new conceptions in
science.
Codification and visibility of scientific contributions
516
responses to new ideas advanced by scientists of differing age. The visibility of new ideas in a discipline may be affected by the sheer volume of its
literature, which may, in turn, be related to its degree of codification. That
is not of interest here. However that may be, our interest lies instead in
the direct implications of codification itself for the visibility of ideas introduced by scientists of differing age.
It would seem that new ideas are more difficult to identify as important
in disciplines that are largely descriptive and only spottily and loosely
organized by theory. In these less codified disciplines, the personal and
social attributes of scientists are more likely to influence the visibility of
their ideas and the reception accorded them. As a result, work by younger
scientists who, on the average, are less widely known in the field, will have
less chance of being noticed in the less codified sciences. Put another way,
the "Matthew effect" (see chapter 20 of this volume )-the tendency for
greater recognition to be accorded contributions by scientists of great repute-is apt to operate with special force in the less codified fields.
Correlatively, in the more codified sciences, new ideas, whatever their
source, can better carry their own credentials. Important contributions by
young scientists, or older ones, for that matter, are not only more visible
in the codified fields; they are taken more seriously since their theoretical
importance can be more re2dily assessed. This tends to put the young on
a par with eminent seniors in communicating ideas and in having them
noticed.
Although Stephen Cole's studies of the Matthew effect have been confined to physics, his findings are suggestive in this regard. In this highly
codified science, the work of eminent investigators is incorporated into
ongoing research only a little more quickly than contributions of comparable quality by less distinguished investigators. The age of physicists
also has had little effect on the speed with which their ideas diffuse. 48 In
physics, then, the merits of the investigation seem to govern its reception
with the attributes of the investigator playing only a small part. Comparative study is now needed to find out whether the strength of the Matthew
effect does in fact vary inversely with the extent to which sciences are
codified.
Codification, inter-science transfers, and discovery
Although, as we have seen, scientists seldom leave the occupation of science altogether, a considerable number transfer from one field to another.
About a quarter of American scientists have made shifts of this kind, the
48. Stephen Cole, "Professional Standing and the Reception of Scientific Discoveries," American Journal of Sociology 76 (1970) :297, 299.
517
518
Scientific disciplines differ in the degree of their theoretical closure and methodological precision. The phenomena most similar to role hybridization would be
shifts from a theoretically and methodologically more advanced discipline to
one less advanced. These must be distinguished from shifts between two disciplines of the same level and from less to more advanced disciplines. 52
The processes and consequences of patterns of transfer among variously
codified sciences have only begun to be investigated. But something of the
process can be pieced together for the eminent men who have changed
fields. They often exhibit an almost playful arrogance about the time required for retooling. Symbolic stories abound. Leo Szilard is said to have
taken all of three weeks at Cold Spring Harbor in order to effect his transformation from physicist to biologist, this at the age of 47. Francis Crick's
leap from physics to biology has been twice chronicled. 53 The same theme
of the rapid acquisition of fundamentals appears in Waddington's account
of the European origins of molecular biology. He writes of the journey to
the first conference of geneticists and crystallographers:
Most of us tried to sleep on the benches in the general saloon, but Darlington
and [the crystallographer] Bernal kept sea-sickness at bay by the former teaching the latter "all the genetics and cytology anyone needs to know" throughout
the course of the night. Before dawn, Bernal had already decided that the
mitotic spindle must be a positive tactoid. 54
This suggests not only that much can be learned in short order but also
that knowledgeable newcomers accustomed to being in command of their
field, even if they are not quite of Bernal's caliber, can achieve enough
understanding of fundamentals to introduce new ideas at the outset.
These topflight migrants from one science to another seem unworried
by their ignorance of the problematics prevailing in the new field. This
keeps them from some stale preconceptions. Maria Goeppert Mayer, the
Nobel laureate, provides an apt example. Her work on "the magic numbers problem" (a problem of such profound interest that it had been given
a name) and her subsequent development of the shell model of the nucleus,
she reports, depended on a specific kind of ignorance. Trained as a physicist but working mainly in physical chemistry, she was brought up on the
52. Joseph Ben-David, "Roles and Innovations in Medicine," American Journal of
Sociology 65 (1960) :557-68; see also, Ben-David and Randall Collins, "Social Factors
in the Origins of a New Science: The Case for Psychology," American Sociological
Review 31 (1966): 557-68.
53. Some fourteen years earlier, Szilard had been told by the physiologist A. V.
Hill that he could pick up the essentials of physiology by simply setting himself the
task of teaching it; see Leo Szilard, "Reminiscences," in Fleming and Bailyn, Intellectual Migration, p. 98. For accounts of Crick's transition, see Watson, Double Helix,
and Robert Olby, "Francis Crick, DNA and the Central Dogma," Daedalus 99 (Fall
1970): 938-87.
54. C. H. Waddington, "Some European Contributions to the Prehistory of Molecular Biology," Nature 221 (1969):318.
519
Like other domains of social life, the social structure of science has its
distinctive array of statuses and roles, allocated to members through complex processes of social selection. We focus here on the status of scientist.
But we should note in passing that the social structure of science, especially
as we know it today after centuries of institutionalization and social differentiation, contains a variety of other statuses and roles. Often indispensable
to the effective advancing of scientific inquiry, these parascientific roles
include technicians of every stripe, the builders of experimental apparatus
and instruments, and the broad spectrum of assistants engaged in facilitating scientific work (for example, by preparing and taking care of experimental materials). 58
55. In a series of papers published in the late 1930s in Reviews of Modern Physics,
Hans Bethe attempted to consolidate what was known then about the atomic nucleus.
That these papers had an immense impact on physics is registered in the fondly respectful title by which they are known.
56. J. H. D. Jensen, who independently solved the same problems, was, interestingly enough, also unaware of prevailing ideas of spin-coupling.
57. On the general idea of the uses of ignorance under certain conditions, see
Wilbert E. Moore and Melvin M. Tumin, "Some Social Functions of Ignorance,"
American Sociological Review 14 (1949) :787-95. On the "outsider" in science and
technology, see S. Colum Gilfillan, The Sociology of Invention (Chicago: Follett,
1935), pp. 88-91; Ben-David, "Roles and Innovations in Medicine," pp. 557-59; and
chapter 5 of this volume.
58. For a short inventory of roles in science, see Weiss, Within the Gates of Science
and Beyond, pp. 29-30. It will be remembered from chapter 16 of this volume that
Francis Bacon described a variety of scientific roles in his Solomon's House.
520
Like other statuses, the status of scientist involves not a single role but,
in varying mixture, a complement of roles. These are of four principal
kinds: research, teaching, administrative, and gatekeeper roles. 59 Each of
these is differentiated into subroles, which we only note here but do not
consider in detail.
The research role, which provides for the growth of scientific knowledge,
is central, with the others being functionally ancillary to it. For plainly, if
there were no scientific investigation, there would be no new knowledge
to be transmitted through the teaching role, no need to allocate resources
for investigation, no research organization to administer, and no new flow
of knowledge for gatekeepers to regulate. Possibly because of its functional
centrality, scientists apparently place greater value on the research role
than any of the others. As is generally the case in maintaining a complex
of mutually sustaining roles, ideology does not fully reflect this differential
evaluation of roles in the role-set: scientists will often insist on the "indispensability" and consequently equal importance of the ancillary roles. Yet,
almost in a pattern of revealed preference, the working of the reward
system in science testifies that the research role is the most highly valued.
The heroes of science are acclaimed in their capacity as scientific investigators, seldom as teachers, administrators or referees and editors.
The research role divides into subroles, distinguished to varying degree
in the different sciences. In research, scientists define themselves and are
defined by others as experimentalists (or, more generally, empirical investigators) or as theorists, with occasional high-yield hybrids such as Enrico
Fermi or Linus Pauling embodying both subroles effectively. The differentiation seems more marked in the more codified sciences. Little is known
about the processes leading scientists to adopt one or another of these
subroles. In the lore of science, this is not even problematic. Scientists
are assumed to become either experimentalists or theorists as their highly
specific capacities dictate. But it seems that the process is more complex
than the simple matching of roles to self-evaluated capacities. It presumably involves, at the least, interaction between developing self-images of
aspirants to scientific investigation, socialization by peers and mentors, and
continuing evaluation of their role performance by peers, superiors, and
themselves.
To the extent that the research role in science involves interaction between scientists, it also makes for some, often reciprocal, teaching and
learning. The teaching role, particularly in the sciences, calls not only for
explicit didactics but, probably much more in the sciences than in the
59. For the general conception that each status has its distinctive complement of
roles, or its role-set, see Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, enlarged ed.
(New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 422-38.
521
humanities, for tacit instruction through observed example. The masterapprentice relation is central to socialization in the sciences, particularly
in laboratories which provide for mutual observability by master and apprentice. This structural difference between the sciences and the humanities
is reflected in the fact that the status of postdoctoral student is widespread
in the sciences and rare in the humanities.
There is, in the normative system of science, an ambivalence toward
the preferred relations between the research and teaching roles. For some,
the norm requires the scientist to recognize his prime obligation to train
up new generations of scientists, but he must not allow teaching to preempt
his energies at the expense of advancing knowledge. For others, the norm
reads just as persuasively in reverse. We have only to remember the complaints about Faraday that he had never trained a successor as Davy had
trained him, yet consider the frequent criticism of scientists who give up
research for teaching. There are indications, as we shall see, that the time
scientists allocate to the roles of teaching and research changes during the
life course.
A third major role of scientists is ordinarily (and not very instructively)
caught up in the term "administration." The term often covers a wide
gamut of quite distinct structural conditions, ranging from occasional service on advisory or policy-making committees, through direction of a smallscale research inquiry to full specialization in the one role as with full-time
"science administrators" or "R & D administrators." What is described as
the increasing bureaucratization of science often refers to the growing
number of full-time administrative roles and their growing power to affect
the course of scientific development. And such bureaucratization, precisely
because it involves allocation of resources to the various sciences and to
groups and individuals within them, also tends to engage more of the
"nonadministrator" scientists in administrative activities: the preparation
of prospectuses on work planned and of reports on work done, this in
addition to the dissemination of the actual results of scientific investigation.
Although it is often (and loosely included under "administration," a
fourth role of the scientist needs to be distinguished from the others since
it is basic to the systems of evaluation and the allocation of roles and
resources in science. This is the gatekeeping role. 60 Variously distributed
60. As is well known, the notion of the gatekeeper role was introduced into social
science by Kurt Lewin in "Forces behind Food Habits and Methods of Change,"
Bulletin of the National Research Council 108 (1943): 65. Alfred de Grazia ("The
Scientific Reception System and Dr. Velikovsky," American Behavioral Scientist 7
[1963]:38-56) and Diana Crane ("The Gatekeepers of Science: Some Factors Affecting the Selection of Articles for Scientific Journals," American Sociologist 2 [1967]:
195-201) refer to editors of journals as "the" gatekeepers of science. This usage is
too restrictive; gatekeepers also regulate scientific manpower and the allocation of
resources for research.
522
523
524
TABLE 3
Distribution of Time Assigned to Their Various Roles by Selected
Cohorts of American Scientists
Work period
Date of
Ph.D.
1935
1940
1945
1950
1960
1955
1960
(5)
(0)
1955
34
(5)
(0)
34
40
1950
(5)
(0)
1945
1940
(5)
42
(5)
(0)
1935
47
(10)
30
(10)
44
33
35
34
36
(20)
(15)
(15)
31
(15)
(10)
42
41
(0)
33
(10)
28
36
28
(25)
(20)
33
32
1960
(5)
(0)
(0)
1950
1945
(5)
42
(0)
1940
(5)
42
(0)
(5)
41
36
33
36
40
32
34
(15)
36
(15)
32
(20)
33
28
(25)
(20)
29
37
(15)
(10)
(10)
(10)
(10)
(5)
45
(0)
1935
43
48
1955
28
26
525
Work period
Date of
Ph.D.
1945
1940
1935
1960
1955
1950
(0)
10
1960
(5)
(0)
1945
1940
1935
22
14
34
30
28
23
(20)
(25)
(20)
(15)
(10)
(5)
26
22
(15)
(10)
18
8
(0)
(15)
(10)
16
11
(5)
(0)
24
16
(5)
(0)
(10)
(5)
(0)
1950
32
30
(0)
8
1960
(5)
(0)
1955
9
(0)
1950
6
(5)
(0)
1940
(5)
9
(15)
9
(15)
(10)
10
12
8
(0)
(15)
(10)
(10)
(20)
10
9
(25)
(20)
8
1945
(10)
(5)
(5)
(0)
1935
15
1955
10
----------------
526
reflects the impact of unique historical events upon the age strata. For the
observed historical bump in role-sequence probably represents the additional teaching that came with the rapid expansion in "GI" programs of
education just after World War II.
Second, table 3 also reflects historically changing patterns in the distribution of time American scientists assign to their several roles at each stage
of their careers. This can be seen by inspecting the left-to-right diagonals
in the first two parts (a and b) of table 3. Consider, for example, the top
diagonal of those having just received the doctorate. Each more recent
cohort tends to devote less of its aggregate time to teaching and more to
research. The historical trend at each of the other stages of the scientists'
careers also approximates this decrease in aggregate cohort time assigned
to teaching and the increase in that assigned to research, except for the
dramatic departure of the 1945 cohort (note that the 1945 row tends to
fall out of line with each of the diagonals in parts a and b of the table).
The experience of the great influx of World War II veterans into colleges
and universities seems to have left an enduring imprint upon the 1945
cohort which, just entering upon their careers at the time, continue at each
succeeding time period to interrupt the general cohort trend of less teaching and more research.
Interestingly enough, the cohort trends in teaching and research are not
accompanied by complementary trends in administrative activity (shown
in the diagonals of table 3, part c). The absence of any consistent trend
here raises some question about the nature of the historically increasing
bureaucratization of science. To be sure, in each cohort scientists devote
relatively more of their aggregate time to administration as they age. But,
age for age, contemporary scientists devote no larger proportion of their
aggregate time to administration than did scientists in past years. 69
A third type of comparison of the figures in table 3, comparison down
the columns, reveals for each time period the combined effects of the lifecourse patterns, cohort trends, and unique historical events we have described. Thus the column for a particular year represents the structuring
of scientific roles among the age strata. Here we find that although the age
strata do not differ substantially in time devoted to teaching, they do show
striking differences in research and administration.
At any given time in the past quarter-century, the younger the stratum
of scientists, the more of their aggregate time they devote to research and
69. Aggregate data of this kind do not allow us to distinguish between role-specialization in the form of full-time administrators and other changes in the distribution of
time among the several role-activities by individual scientists. As noted earlier in
this section, both types of change are often and indiscriminately caught up in the
phrase "the bureaucratization of science." It should be noted also that changes in the
proportions of scientists employed by universities, government, and industry affect
the observed historical patterns.
527
the less to administration. In 1960, for example, this ranges in linear progression from 26 percent of all work time being assigned to research by
the 1935 cohort (then twenty-five years past the Ph.D. and presumably
in their early 50s) to 48 percent by the most recent cohort of 1960 (then
having just received the doctorate and presumably in their late 20s). Put
more generally, these results suggest that the social system of science
provides more time for the research role to younger than to older scientists.
Like the youthful age structure of science generally, this distribution of
roles accords with the widespread ideology70 that holds that "science is a
young man's game."
These data, representing aggregate averages for cohorts, of course provide only a rough approximation of individually patterned role sequences
among scientists. They do not indicate the composite patterns of time that
scientists allocate to their various roles at each phase in their careers. Nor,
unlike panel data, do they indicate changes in these patterns for individual
scientists during the course of their careers.
Partial but suggestive evidence on the individual patterning of roles can
be found in the Harmon data. 71 Of particular interest are the age patterns
of specialization that can be identified. While there are no notable age
differences in the proportion spending full time on some one activity in
their current jobs72--on teaching or research or administration-there are
striking differences among the age strata in the type of specialization that
does tend to occur. These differences parallel those found in the cohort
analysis of table 3 above. Thus the young are far more likely than the old
to give the major portion of their time to research; conversely, the older
strata are more likely to specialize in administrative roles (while age differences in teaching are not pronounced). For example, Harmon finds that
1. The proportion of scientists devoting no time at all to research on
their present job is twice as large in the oldest age category as in the
youngest; the proportion devoting full time to research is half as large.
2. Among the oldest, the percentage spending full time in administration is four times as large as in the youngest stratum.
The same general patterns emerge in examining the composites of roles
performed by scientists in the several age strata. For example:
70. We describe this as ideology since it includes both idea and norm, both what is
assumed to be and what should be. It is, of course, only one component in the
ideology about the roles of young and old in science.
71. Profile of Ph.D.'s in the Sciences, tables 9-11, pp. 19-21, and appendix 6,
tables A, B, C, and D.
72. As can be observed by adding the relevant percentages in Harmon's table 9
(ibid., p. 19), 31 percent of the youngest age category, 27 percent of the middle
stratum, and 30 percent of the oldest category devote full time to either teaching or
research or administration.
528
The ideological accent on youth in science provides part of the context for
shifts in roles. In its extreme form, the doctrine holds that the best scientific
work is done early in the career with nothing of consequence to be expected
after that. P. A. M. Dirac, one of the more powerful minds in theoretical
physics, found occasion to express this gloomy version, partly in parody,
partly in sadness:
Age is, of course, a fever chill
that every physicist must fear.
He's better dead than living still
when once he's past his thirtieth year. 75
On this view, the scientists who have made significant contributions early
in their careers burn out soon afterwards. And the many more who have
done little in their early years can count on doing even less later on. For
73. Harmon, ibid., pp. 19-20. Note that all cohorts are combined in this portion
of the analysis.
74. Derived by comparison of the summated frequencies in the upper-right diagonal
(increasers) with the lower-left diagonal (decreasers) of Harmon's table 11 (ibid.,
p. 21). A similar, though less pronounced, tendency to attrition is apparent through
parallel analysis of individual shifts in the teaching role (table 10, p. 20), clearly
pointing to administration as the activity compensating for declines in research.
75. It is appropriate that Dirac should have formulated his mathematical theory
describing the relativistic electron when he was 26 and that he became a Fellow of
the Royal Society at 28 and a Nobel laureate just over the watershed age, at 31.
529
530
time of their first papers, while scientists in the matched sample were past
28. What is more in point in the matter of role-retention is the publishing
record toward the other end of the career. Of the nine laureates and their
matches who had passed the age of 70, all the laureates but only three of
the paired scientists continued to publish, indicating that they have more
staying power in the research role. In part, this may result from their being
subject to consistently greater expectations, both from others in the immediate and extended environment, to remain productive in research and
in part, from their having established routines of work, also supported by
the environment. One laureate, then past 80, reports that he feels no
obligation to continue doing research-as he puts it, "After all, enough is
enough"; nevertheless, his papers continue to appear in the scientific journals.79 The oldest laureate, ~ P. Rous, was described as "still hard' at
work" at the michelangelical age of 87.
Retention of the research role, or its attrition, among scientists ranked
high in accomplishment seems to be affected also by their selection of
reference individuals and reference groups for self-appraisal. Some take
their own prior achievements as a benchmark and conclude that the
prospects are slight for their maintaining that standard. They become more
receptive to the opportunities for taking up other roles: administering
research organizations, serving as elder statesmen to provide liaison
between science and other institutional spheres, or, occasionally, leaving
the field of science altogether for ranking positions in university administration or international diplomacy. Other eminent scientists take the
run of scientists as their reference group. They conclude that even if
youthful peaking has occurred for them, they will continue to be far more
productive, even on the assumed down slope of their careers, than most
other scientists at the peak of their careers.
Query: The generic problem of the determinants of selection of reference groups remains unsolved. Taking the matter of roleretention by scientists as a strategic case in point, we ask: What
leads some scientists, highly productive in their youth, to take
this as a reference mark and to anticipate relative unproductivity
in the future, while other scientists, equally productive in their
youth, anticipate relative productivity as they compare their
work with that of most scientists even in their most productive
years.
79. In her restudy of fifty-four eminent scientists, seventeen of them over the age
of 65 at the time of her revisit, Anne Roe ("Changes in Scientific Activities with
Age," Science 150 [1965]:313-18) also found that they tended to persist in their research, even when taking up administrative roles.
531
The value system of science can make for a retention of the research
role in spite of the ideology of research as essentially a young man's game.
Of the various roles in the institution of science, greatest value is attached
to research, theoretical and experiential. As a result, the self-esteem of
scientists once effectively engaged in research depends greatly upon their
continuing to do research, even though they may be plagued by doubts
stemming from the ideology of youth. Beyond that, many scientists,
precisely because they are minds trained in scientific inference, realize that
even if scientific productivity or creativity does decline with aging for most
scientists, it of course remains unsound to assume that this must hold for
any particular scientist.
Conducing to retention of the research role is the comparative ambiguity
about the kind and number of contributions to knowledge that would justify
one's continuing in research. Since few make pathbreaking contributions,
even an occasional craftsmanlike piece of work may be enough to maintain
the self-conception of being engaged in research. This is particularly the
case for academic scientists who, in the aggregate, appear to devote much
the same proportion of their time-about one-fifth-to research during the
greater part of their active career. It is the scientists in nonacademic
employment, whose research productivity is presumably gauged in more
utilitarian terms, that successively devote less of their time to research
and more to administration. 80 This pattern suggests that the criteria of
what constitutes "satisfactory research" differ within the social subsystems
of science in academia, industry and government with consequent differences in rates of role-retention. 81
Patterns of role-retention and attrition probably differ also among the
various levels in the social stratification of science. For there are socially
stratified differences in opportunity-structure and in socially patterned
pressures in science as in other departments of social life. Eminent research
scientists are often subject to cross-pressures. On the one hand, in accord
with the principle of cumulative advantage, their earlier achievements in
research ordinarily provide them with enlarged facilities for research. On
the other, the prestige they have gained in the research role often leads
them to be sought out for alternative roles as advisors, sages, and statesmen, both within the domain of science and in the larger society.
In the main, however, the socially reinforced commitment to research
seems to prevail in the upper reaches of the stratification system. This
80. The data on these patterns are set out in the second career patterns report
following up the Harmon report; see the National Research Council, Careers of
PhD's, p. 53.
81. For apposite observations, see Simon Marcson, The Scientist in American In
dustry (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), and Barney G. Glaser, Organizational
Scientists: Their Professional Careers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964).
532
533
534
535
The various patterns of role-change in the life course involve an interplay between the individual's own expectations and those prevailing in the
relevant social environment. This means, of course, that role-changes are
affected both by developments distinctive to individuals and by trends in
their environment. Individuals experience the social correlates of their own
aging in particular social contexts. The contexts affect the meaning they
attach to those changes and their adaptations to them. Early retirement
536
from the research role should thus have different consequences for successive cohorts of scientists who come upon this experience at differing points
in the historically evolving social structure of science. For scientific investigators to turn to the role of science administrator or science educator at
a time in which such changes are relatively infrequent is quite another kind
of experience than doing so when it has become common. In complementary fashion, both the probability and consequences of such shifts from
research to other roles differ according to the changing degree of support
-economic, technical, and social-available for research. The rapid growth
in such resources has meant, for example, that the advanced graduate student or newfledged Ph.D. can now obtain technical help and services not
available to seasoned investigators a generation ago. 89 This change may
directly affect the age of entry into consequential research and indirectly
affect the competitive positions of the various age cohorts of research
scientists.
The Riley-Johnson-Foner model and Pinder's striking formulation of
"the noncontemporaneity of the contemporaneous" 90 both suggest to us
that the various age cohorts of scientists will tend to perceive the allocation of resources and the role structure of science from differing perspectives. For the newest cohorts, coming into science at a time of abundance,
the availability of resources is largely a matter of ordinary expectation.
After all, this is all they know from their own direct experience. The older
cohorts tend to see this as drastic change, and not necessarily all for the
better, as they nostalgically and sometimes invidiously contrast the current
affluence to their own difficult days as novice investigators when outside
resources were meager and inner resources all-important.
Other age-connected differences in perspective may derive from the
allocation of roles within the changing status-structure of science. Younger
scientists often come to see the positions of power practically monopolized
89. Polykarp Kusch, "Style and Styles in Research," Robert A. Welsh Foundation
Research Bulletin 20 (1966): 12.
90. "Die 'Ungleichzeitigkeit' des Gleichzeitigen" is the seemingly paradoxical
phrasing adopted by the art historian, Wilhelm Pinder, to introduce his distinction
between Gleichzeitigkeit (contemporaneity or temporal coexistence) and Gleichaltrigkeit (coevality, coetaneity or the condition of age cohorts). Consider this germane
passage: "Jeder lebt mit Gleichaltrigen und Verschiedenaltrigen in einer Fiille gleichzeitiger Moglichkeiten. Fiir jeden ist die gleiche Zeit eine andere Zeit, namlich ein
anderes Zeitalter seiner selbst, das er nur mit Gleichaltrigen teilt. Jeder Zeitpunkt hat
fiir Jeden nicht nur dadurch einen anderen Sinn, dass er selbstverstandlich von Jedem
in individueller Farbung erlebt wird, sondem-als wirklicher 'Zeitpunkt,' unterhalb
alles individuellen-schon dadurch, dass das gleiche J ahr fiir einen Fiinfzigjahrigen
ein anderer Zeitpunkt seines Lebens ist, als fiir einen Zwanzigjahrigen-und so fort
in zahllosen Varianten" (Wilhelm Pinder, Das Problem der Generation in der
Kunstgeschichte Europas, 2d ed. [Berlin: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1928], chap.
1 at p. 11). This sort of observation on contemporaneous age-cohorts and their
perspectives is fully caught up in the Riley-Johnson-Foner model.
537
by older scientists. For although the professionalization and institutionalization of science and the great growth in the resources of science have
multiplied the number of policy-making roles, it may be that the exponential increase in numbers of scientists, all apart from other processes, has
tended actually to decrease the proportions of the newer cohorts in these
positions and to raise the age at which they enter them.
These few observations on the differing perspectives' of younger and
older scientists might seem to imply that the relations between these cohorts
are dominated by stress, strain, and conflict. But to focus on the structure
and processes making for tension and conflict is not, of course, to say that
these are all. We have noted the integrative aspects of complementary
age-connected roles in the process of socialization in science where, perhaps more often than in other disciplines, the roles of teacher and student
soon become transformed into those of research colleagues. The differentiated age structure of research groups provide bases for cooperation as
well as conflict. It is probably in the politics of science that conflict between
the age strata of scientists runs deep. 91
4. Gerontocracy in Science
The claim that the organization of science is controlled by gerontocracy is
anything but new. Complaints to this effect appeared as early as the seventeenth century and perhaps before. But the vast historical changes in the
scale and power of science greatly intensify and complicate the problems
of social control.
Dysfunctions of gerontocracy
538
539
540
TABLE4
Mean Age at Election to National Academy of Sciences According to
Organizational Affiliation of Scientists, 1863-1967
Affiliation
Mean age
Number
48.9
843
141
285
70
Major universities
Government
Other universities and colleges
Industry
No affiliation
Retired
51.5
51.8
53.3
53.7
66.8
54
12
1405
No information
Total
1413
TABLE 5
Mean Age at Election to National Academy of Sciences, 1863-1967
Time of
election
Before 1900
1900-19
1920-39
1940-59
1960-67
Mean age
Number
47.0
49.2
195
158
252
522
286
1413
51.1
50.5
50.7
increasingly held by older people. For even in the past half-century when
the average age at which they acquire these positions has stabilized or
declined somewhat, this has been occurring in a period when exponential
growth has been producing an increasingly youthful population of scientists. This results in widened discrepancies of age between .the governing
and the governed and might be enough to produce a sense of increasing
gerontocracy. Moreover, when, as in the case of the National Academy,
the status, once acquired, is retained for life,99 the aging of the group is
encouraged by the increasing longevity of its members. 100
The age-distribution of those occupying the positions of power in science
does not tell us, of course, how that power is exercised. Systematic inquiry,
rather than swift assumption, is needed to find out whether there are age99. Members of the Academy recently rejected the proposal that they should become emeriti after the age of 75.
100. The longevity of college graduates has been increasing in the United States
for at least the past century.
541
One recent study of the referee system in science101 touches upon the
question. Drawing upon the archives for the nine years 1948-56 of the
Physical Review, the outstanding journal in physics, the study examines the
behavior of scientists of differing rank and age in the gatekeeper's role.
The referee system calls for evaluation of manuscripts by experts on their
subject. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that referees for the Physical
Review were drawn disproportionately from physicists of high rank. 102
Compared with the 5 percent of the 1,056 authors (themselves in some
measure a selected aggregate), 103 almost 12 percent of the 354 referees
assessing their papers were in the highest rank. Moreover, these 12 percent
contributed one-third of all referee judgments. They refereed an average
of 8.5 papers compared with 3.8 for the referees of intermediate rank and
1.4 for the rank-and-file. And although 45 percent of the referees were
under the age of 40, thus giving major responsibility to the relatively
young, we know that physicists are altogether a youthful aggregate and
research physicists particularly so. 104 Fully 74 percent of the papers submitted to the Physical Review came from physicists under the age of 40.
The referees, then, are older and higher in prestige and rank than the
authors or the general population of physicists. But, as we have noted,
such a skewed age distribution among those holding power is simply a
101. Harriet Zuckerman and Robert K. Merton, "Patterns of Evaluation in Science,"
Minerva 9 (1971): 92-94; reprinted as the preceding chapter in this volume, it does
542
static indicator of structure; it provides no information about the functioning and consequences of that structure. Age-distribution does not in
itself represent gerontocracy. For even when used descriptively rather than
invidiously, the word "gerontocracy" ordinarily carries with it the notion
that power disproportionately placed in the hands of the elders comes to be
used to their own advantage or, in more moderate version, that it results
in policies and decisions that differ drastically from those that are or would
be adopted by younger power-holders. In the case of the gatekeeper role,
we want to know, then, whether the behavior of referees is systematically
affected by their own age and rank as well as by the age and rank of
authors.
One piece of evidence takes us a certain distance toward gauging the
extent to which the rejection and acceptance of manuscripts for publication was affected by the standing of referees and authors. In examining this
evidence, we should note again that eminence in science derives largely
from the assessed quality of past and not necessarily continuing scientific
accomplishments. And we have found that, in science, as in other institutional spheres, positions of power and authority tend to be occupied by
older men. From these joint patterns, it would seem that if sheer power
and eminence greatly affect the decisions of referees, then manuscripts
submitted by older eminent scientists . should have the highest rate of
acceptance. 105
But at least in physics, the distinctively young man's science, this is not
what we find. As we have seen in chapter 21 of this volume, "it is not the
older scientists whose papers were most often accepted but the younger
ones. And the age-graded rates of acceptance hold within each rank in the
hierarchy of esteem.... Both eminence and youth contribute to the probability of having manuscripts accepted; youth to such a degree that the
youngest stratum of physicists in the third rank had as high an acceptance
rate as. the oldest stratum of eminent ones whose work, we must suppose,
was no longer of the same high quality it once was." 106
105. On the general hypothesis, see Storer, The Social System of Science (New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), pp. 132-34. This hypothesis assumes that
the identity of the authors of manuscripts is known to the referees; this is the case
for the Physical Review,, which does not try to .provide for anonymity of authors,
since, it is maintained, this cannot be achieved in most cases. Referees, however, are
generally anonymous.
106. See above, pp. 488-89; also see table 4 of chapter 21 in this volume. Some
caution must be exercised in this comparison, however, since most of the scientists
for whom no information on age was available are in the third rank. These scientists have a relatively low acceptance rate and, should they also be disproportionately young, could depress the acceptance figure for the younger third-ranking
scientists below that for the oldest first-ranking.
543
544
TABLE6
Referees' Decisions to Accept Manuscripts, by Age of Authors
and Referees
Age of referees
Age of
authors
20-29
30-39
40-49"
50+
Under 40
%
No.
Acceptjudgances
ments
59
63
63
43
No information 53
All ages
58
106
193
65
42
106
512
40 andover
%
No.
Acceptjudgances
ments
76
63
58
43
52
61
136
189
71
61
96
553
Total judgments
by referees
%
No.
Acceptjudgances
ments
68
63
60
43
52
60
242
382
136
103
202
1065
545
ance of those roles. We hazard the conjecture that the more theoretically
codified the science the greater the consensus among the age strata in their
patterns of evaluation. The more codified disciplines such as physics should
exhibit less disparity between age cohorts than less codified disciplines
such as sociology on all manner of evaluations: the comparative significance of problems requiring investigation and of contributions to the field
as well as such questions of science policy as the allocation of resources
to various kinds of research.
It should be noted also that the question of gerontocracy in the formation of broad science policy remains as much a matter of conjecture as the
question of gerontocracy within scientific disciplines. We know, for example, that the mean age of members of PSAC (President's Science Advisory
Committee) has been about 50, with the Eisenhower advisors being somewhat older and the Kennedy advisors somewhat younger. But we do not
know how far the age composition of this and of other advisory and policymaking groups affects the substance of science policy. 109 In exploring this
Mean ages of
members of PSAC
Year
1958
1962
1965
1969
Eisenhower
Kennedy
Johnson
Nixon
53.8
49.0
50.3
50.5
No. of advisors
(18)
(17)
(15)
(11)
question, we need to distinguish the age composition and the rates of tumover of these influential groups, recognizing that each may have its independent effect. It would come as no surprise to find that optimum science
policy is apt to be developed neither by gerontocracy nor by juvenocracy
but, like the community of scientists itself, by age-diversified meritocracy.
5. Age, Social Stratification, and Collaboration in Science
The extent to which significant interaction takes place within age strata
and between them, together with the consequences of such patterns, are no
better known for the domain of science than for most other institutional
spheres. Although there has been no investigation to determine which
activities in science tend to be age-segregated or age-integrated, it is evident that some basic functions of science are served through institutional
arrangements involving interaction between age strata rather than separation of them. First among these is, of course, education and training, both
in the narrow sense of transmission of knowledge and skills and in the
109. On the general issue, see Rose and Rose, Science and Society, pp. 266-68.
546
broader sense of socialization involving the transmission of values, attitudes, interests, and role-defined behavior. Since he has himself been variously engaged in the process of professional socialization, just about every
scientist has his own opinion about how that process actually works. Yet
the plain fact is that there has been little methodical investigation of that
process in science.U 0
Queries: Which components in the culture of science are principally
transmitted by older to younger scientists? And which are
largely acquired from age peers? Do these age-channeled
streams of socialization merge or diverge? Which of the values,
interests, and patterns of behavior derived from differing age
strata are mutually supporting, complementary, or at odds?
Do the observed patterns of socialization tend to persist so as
to be much the same for successive age cohorts or are they
subject to change, among other things, in response to the
changing boundaries, technology, problematics, and substance
of the sciences? How does the age-patterned process of socialization differ among the various sciences and these, in turn,
from socialization in other fields of learning (such as the humanities and technology)?
Growth of research collaboration in science
547
TABLE 7
Percentage of Multiauthored Papers in the Physical and Biological
Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities, 1900-59
Date of
publication
1900-09
1910-19
1920-29
1930-39
1940-49
1950-59
Total
Physical
and
biological
sciences
25
31
49
56
66
83
66
(928)
(1,685)
(2,148)
(3,964)
(4,918)
(9,995)
(23,639)
Social
sciences
6
11
16
32
(2,643)
(3,905)
( 4,328)
(6,605)
20 (17,481)
Humanities
1
2
2
1
1
( 1,822)
(2,088)
(1,972)
(2,304)
(8,186)
SouRcE: Zuckerman, "Nobel Laureates in the United States," pp. 76-77 (adapted).
NoTE: The figures were compiled by counting the number of authors of articles appearing
in a sample of journals for two of every ten years. The physical and biological sciences
include the fields of physics, chemistry, biology; the social sciences include anthropology,
economics, political science, psychology, and sociology; the humanities, history, language
and literature, and philosophy.
rate of collaboration. Both contrast with the humanities which have practically no place for collaborative research reported in scholarly articles.
Rank-stratified rates of collaboration
548
TABLE 8
Percentage of Multiauthored Papers by Age of Publication, for Nobel
Laureates and a Matched Sample of Scientists
Age at
publication
Laureates
Matched
sample
20-29
30-39
40-49
50-59
60orover
58
65
66
60
55
40
55
53
51
46
Total
62 (5,512)
(523)
(1,382)
(1,641)
(1,198)
(768)
(288)
(756)
(590)
(622)
(264)
51 (2,520)
549
Toward the other end of the career, the dropoff in published research,
which we have noted in the data put together by Wayne Dennis113 may
mean that collaborators are no longer as available as before. It is in this
phase also that scientists often turn to broader "philosophical" or "sociological" subjects of a kind that have little place for collaboration.
It is the middle years, then, that presumably provide both the greatest
opportunity and deepest role-induced motivation for collaborative work.
Should the curvilinear pattern of collaboration turn out to be fairly general,
it need not be counteracted by the historical trend toward more and more
collaboration in the sciences; for the reasons we have indicated, it may
even become more marked in successive age cohorts.
Consider now the consistently higher rates of collaboration among laureates at each phase of their life course. Throughout our interpretation,
we make the rather undemanding assumption that, on the average, laureates
exhibited evidence of greater talent for research than a random assortment
of other scientists of their age in the same field. This perceptible difference
would have set certain consequential processes in motion-processes such
as self-selection and selective recruitment. In their twenties, as their capacities became identified, laureates-to-be were more often selected as apprentices by scientists of assured standing. (Although it would be too much to
say that laureates are bred by laureates, it is the case that forty-four of the
eighty-four American prizewinners worked, as younger men, under a total
of sixty-three older laureates.) There is reason to assume that these masters
were more willing to grant coauthorship to their apprentices than were
those of less elev~ted and secure standing. 114 This would make for the
higher rate of published collaboration by laureates-to-be in their youth.
The life chances of scientists are greatly improved by having their substantial abilities identified early. 115 By the time they were in their thirties,
every laureate had a position in a major university or research laboratory
113. See Dennis: "Age and Productivity Among Scientists"; "Age and Achievement"; "Age Decrement in Outstanding Scientific Contributions"; and "Creative
Productivity between the Ages of 20 and 80."
114. Only one laureate complained that he had been deprived of authorship by his
senior collaborator when, in his judgment, it was deserved. Far more often, the
laureates reported what they perceived as generous treatment in the matter of coauthorship with their typically eminent sponsors.
115. On the bias in favor of precocity built into current institutions for detecting
and rewarding talent, see Alan Gregg For Future Doctors (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1957). The crucial point, which holds in the domain of science as
well as in the field of medical practice of which Gregg writes, is this: "once you
have most of your students of the same age, the academic rewards-from scholarships to internships and residencies-go to those who are uncommonly bright for
their age. In other words, you have rewarded precocity which may or may not be
the precursor of later ability. So, in effect you have unwittingly belittled man's
cardinal educational capital-time to mature" (italics added). For further sociological
implications of this institutionalized bias, see chapter 19 of this volume.
550
As they move into the role of senior collaborators, the laureates seem to
reproduce the same patterns of collaborative work with youngsters that
they themselves experienced when they were young. This may tum out to
be one of several kinds of reenactment of role-defined patterns of behavior
at successive stages in the careers of scientists, especially those who occupy
statuses comparable to those of their masters in the past. They are in a
position to attract promising young scientists whose contributions are
sufficient to merit coauthorship, much as the laureates, when they were
young, were also included among the authors of papers. They are also in
a position, even before receiving the Nobel prize (since most of them were
eminent before being accorded that ultimate symbol of accomplishment),
to exercise cost-free noblesse oblige, the generosity expected of those occupying undisputed rank, by granting authorship even to junior collaborators
who, in the given case, may not have contributed much.
We cannot demonstrate that the laureates are more apt than less distinguished scientists to acknowledge the contributions of junior associates,
since we do not know how much the younger men had actually contributed.
We can, however, compare the degree of recognition given to collaborators
on jointly authored papers. We can approximate a check on this model of the
laureates' re-enactment of collaborative roles as they move through their
career by comparing the variously visible name-orders of authors of joint
papers published by the laureates and by scientists in the matched sample
(who, we now report, were matched not only for age, specialty, and organizational affiliation but also for the initial letter of their last name) .11 6 A
prevalent type of name-ordering gives prime visibility to the first author. 117
The evidence is consistent with our model of complementary roles being
re-enacted in the course of the life-work-cycle. 118 The laureates-to-be, when
116. This is designed, of course, to control for variations that would otherwise
occur in cases of alphabetical ordering of authors.
117. On the social symbolism of name-ordering among authors of scientific papers,
see Zuckerman, "Patterns of Name-Ordering among Authors of Scientific Papers: A
Study of Social Symbolism and Its Ambiguity," American Journal of Sociology 74
(1968): 276-91.
118. It should be emphasized that the samples consist of scientists working within
a particular historical and institutional context: one sample comprises forty-one of
the fifty-five laureates at work in the United States (in 1963); the matched sample
was drawn from American Men of Science. Obviously the attribution of authorship
551
they were in their twenties, were first authors on nearly half of all their
collaborative papers at the same time that scientists in the matched sample
were first only a third of the time. In papers coauthored with their laureate
masters, the pattern is even more marked, with the young scientists being
first authors in 60 percent of the papers and the laureates in only 16 percent.119 Moving into the role of senior collaborator, the laureates, by the
time they were in their forties, reduplicate the pattern taking first authorship on only 26 percent of their collaborative papers at the same time that
the scientists in the matched sample do so in 56 percent of their collaborative papers. The negligible cost of this kind of noblesse oblige for scientists
who have made their mark is put in so many words by a laureate in biochemistry: "It helps a young man to be senior author, first author, and
doesn't detract from the credit I get if my name is farther down on the list."
Substantial qualitative evidence obtained in interviews with laureates
confirms that this kind of re-enactment of complementary roles often occurs
when they have attained a status like that of their own masters. But this
fact does not rule out other, not necessarily incompatible, interpretations
of the numerical evidence on first-authorship. The dual pattern of authorship might also reflect age-associated changes and rank-stratified differences
in the extent of contributions to collaborative papers. In their youth, the
laureates-to-be might in fact have contributed more to jointly published
papers than their age peers in the matched sample and so appear as first
author more of the time. And, in their maturity, the laureates, having
attracted talented youngsters, might simply be re-experiencing the same
phenomenon, this time from the perspective of the senior role, with their
young collaborators making prime contributions and so being accorded
first place. Correlatively, the age-matched scientists of less distinction, in
their youth, will have contributed less and received first authorship less
often in their collaborative papers with their less distinguished mentors,
just as, in their maturity, they re-enact the pattern by attracting, on the
average, less talented youthful collaborators than those coming to the laureates and so would themselves turn up more often as first authors. It is
the processes of self-selection and selective recruitment operating within
the context of the reward system of science, rather than any autarchic
scientist-playwright, which recreate this drama in many times and places
would be quite different in institutional frameworks where all or much of the research
done in a laboratory or department is regularly ascribed to their chiefs. This is just
another instanee of institutional contexts serving to pattern interpersonal relations.
119. Neither laureates-to-be nor their laureate masters were first authors in the
remaining 24 percent of papers. This situation is in marked contrast to papers coauthored by scientist peers, both of whom later became laureates. For these papers,
one future laureate is just as apt as the other to be first author in papers having at
least three authors.
552
with the plot and roles remaining intact, and the only change being that the
inevitably aging members of the cast now play, in the style of their mentors, roles complementary to the ones they played in their youth.
Age, recognition, and the structure of authority in science
The observed patterns of authorship might therefore involve the re-enactment of complementary roles at different phases in the career in an apparently different way than we had at first supposed. They might reflect the
objective situation of differing extent of contribution rather than the exercise of noblesse oblige that came with established standing. In broader
theoretical perspective, however, these hypotheses turn out to be much the
same. They bring us back to the general idea, much emphasized in our
discussion of gerontocracy, that the age distribution of power and authority
in science, as elsewhere, is only a static structural fact and does not, in
itself, tell us much about how that power and authority are actually
exercised.
In the matter of deciding on authorship and name-order as symbolic of
contribution, it is generally the senior investigator who has the authority.
The exercise of that authority is hedged in by norms and by constraints
of maintaining a degree of cooperation in the research group. As the laureates and the matched sample of scientists take over control of these decisions, they apparently do not exercise raw power by putting themselves
uniformly in the forefront. At the least, the data suggest, they tend to
accede to the norms governing authority; at most, and especially when
secure in high rank, they engage in cost-free supererogation.
This much can be said then about our specimen of interplay between
social stratification and age stratification in science. Having moved early
into the higher reaches of the opportunity-structure, the laureates are more
apt to collaborate at every age than other investigators of less eminence.
Their tendency toward collaboration we take to be reinforced by their ability
to contribute enough to merit association and coauthorship with masters in
the field when they are young and by status-supported dispositions to share
authorship with the young when they are mature or old. And, to repeat,
these patterns obtain within an institutional framework that calls for ascribing credit for research on the basis of contribution rather than having it
uniformly assigned, as in an authoritarian framework, to the head of a
department or laboratory.
But, as we have suggested earlier in this section, the change toward Big
Science, partly reflected in the growth of multiauthorship, makes for a
change in the structure of power and authority in science where, goodwill,
noblesse oblige, and normative constraints notwithstanding, it becomes
increasingly difficult and sometimes impossible to gauge the contributions
553
Without going into the matter further, it becomes evident that the apparently bland subject of age patterns of collaboration opens up into a large
array of basic questions about the operation of contemporary science.
Here, as elsewhere in the field, we are still long on demonstrable questions
and short on demonstrated answers. But we have seen enough, in this section of our chapter and in the section touching upon gerontocracy, to
identify a variety of related problems.
554
555
556
have made it explicit, while at the next moment he thinks it a generalization much in need of systematic inquiry. In the conspicuous absence of
methodical evidence as distinct from much anecdotage bearing on the
matter, we are inclined to dissolve the ambivalence by plumping for further
investigation.
The question of there being age-patterned foci of attention and theoretical perspectives in science need not be limited to the rare cases of fundamental changes in the structure of prevailing theory. There is reason to
suppose that such age-stratified differences obtain more generally. Although the modal pl'lttern is probably one in which the several age cohorts
of investigators in a field center on much the same problems, we should
not be surprised to find a subsidiary pattern in which young and older
scientists tend to focus their work on different problems and so to attend
to somewhat different segments of the work going on in the field. It should
not be difficult to find out whether such subsidiary age-stratified patterns
do occur. A systematic content analysis 125 of papers published by scientists
of differing age would yield the information needed on the foci of research
just as systematic citation analyses 126 would yield the correlative information needed on the range of work to which they are paying attention.
Consider briefly how patterns of citation might reflect age-stratified differences in the foci of scientific attention. Our conjectural model of the
sources and consequences of such differences involves a re-enactment of
complementary role-behavior by successive age cohorts much like that
which we have provisionally identified for patterns of scientific collabora125. For rather primitive instances of such content-analyses of scientific work,
which did not, however, go on to examine possible differences among scientists of
differing age or rank, see the classification of papers in the Philosophical Transactions
1665-1702 and the research recorded in the minutes of the Royal Society in the
seventeenth century in chapter 8 in this volume.
126. Ever since the invention of the Science Citation Index, citation studies have
been increasing at such a rapid rate that they threaten to get out of hand. Many
methodological problems are being neglected in their frequently uncritical use. Moreover, the very existence of the SCI and the growing abundance of citation analyses
(even for such matters as aids in deciding upon the appointment and promotion of
scientists) may lead to changes in citation practices that will in due course contaminate or altogether invalidate them as measures of the quality of research. This would
not be the first case where the introduction of statistical records of role performance
has led to a displacement of goals in which the once-reliable statistical indicator
rather than the actual performance becomes the center of manipulative concern. On
the early use of citation analyses, see Garfield, Sher, and Torpie, The Use of Citation
Data in Writing the History of Science; for a critical overview of methodological
problems in citation-analysis, see J. Cole and S. Cole, Social Stratification in Science,
chap. 2; S. Cole and J. Cole, "Measuring the Quality of Sociological Research: Problems in the Use of the Science Citation Index," American Sociologist 6 ( 1971): 2329; and Richard D. Whitley and Penelope A. Frost, "The Measurement of Performance in Research," Human Relations 24 (1971): 161-78. On displacement of
goals in statistical measures of performance, see Peter Blau, The Dynamics of Bureaucracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), chap. 3.
557
tion. We begin with one well-worn assumption and one familiar fact. The
assumption (which is also adopted by Kuhn) holds that the time in their
career at which scientists encounter ideas will significantly affect their responses to them. The familiar fact is the strong, and perhaps increasing,
emphasis in science on keeping up with work on the frontiers of the field,
that is, with new work.
Whether the intensity of concern with keeping abreast of new work is
age-stratified or not-we know of no evidence bearing on this-it should
have somewhat different consequences among the age cohorts. Plainly, the
work that scientists come to know as new when they enter the field ages
along with them. As incoming cohorts move toward what in science is a
swiftly approaching middle age, the work they had focused on in their
youth has grown "old," as age of publications is judged in much of contemporary science. 127 The problems, new or old, which members of the
older cohorts are investigating will often reactivate memories of pertinent
work in the literature which they had encountered as new in years gone
by. Meanwhile, the younger cohort working at the same time turn their
attention primarily to new work (just as their middle-aged colleagues did
in their youth). But not having the same immediate knowledge about work
which had been done in the, for them, remote past of fifteen or twenty
years before, they are less apt to be put in mind of earlier germane investigations.
In this model, scientists in each successive cohort re-enact much the
same citation behavior at the same phases of their career. By doing so,
younger and older scientists to a degree contribute differently to the development of science: the older scientists providing somewhat more for intellectual continuity by linking current work with work done some time
before; the younger scientists pushing ahead somewhat more on their own,
less "encumbered" by past formulations. We suggest that although the
norms governing the communication of scientific knowledge are much the
same for all, leeway in their observance is enough to allow for the occurrence of such unplanned, and often unnoticed, variation in the age-patterned reporting of scientific work.
If these conjectured differences do in fact obtain, they should be reflected in various ways. For one thing, younger scientists should be given
more than older ones to making rediscoveries: findings and ideas, independently arrived at, that are substantively identical with earlier ones or
functionally equivalent to them. 128 The Santayana dictum that those who
fail to remember history are destined to repeat it should hold with special
127. It will be remembered from section 2 of this chapter that the half-life of
references in many of the sciences is five years or less.
128. On patterns of rediscovery, see Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure,
chap. 1.
558
559
Concluding Remarks
An exploratory paper like this one has no place for "conclusions,'' but it
does call for a few afterthoughts.
Plainly we have only touched upon the problematics of our subject, not
having discussed a variety of questions which even now could be examined
to good purpose. Here is a scattering of examples:
How is the age of research groups related to their scientific productivity?131
What is the age distribution of the "founders" of new formations in the
various sciences: for example, new specialties, new forms of investigation
(laboratories), new journals, scientific societies, and so forth?
What is the relation between the quantity and quality of scientific output
at various phases in the scientific career?
How is age variously associated with intellectual authority 132 and with
bureaucratic authority in science, and what are the consequences of such
differences for the development of scientific disciplines?
What historical changes have occurred in the span of research careers,
and how do these relate to the durability of the intellectual influence of
scientists?
To what extent do age cohorts in science develop into age-sets with
their continued interaction and solidarity to produce old-boy networks (not
unlike new-boy networks)?
Perhaps enough has been said to indicate what we take to be the principal aim of investigating questions of this sort. That aim is to find out how
age and age structure variously interact with the cognitive structure and
development of science.
131. For a critical examination of the question since the first studies by H. A.
Shepard, W. P. Wells, D. C. Pelz, and F. M. Andrews, see Clagett G. Smith, "Age
of Rand D Groups: A Reconsideration," Human Relations 23 (1970): 81-96; also
Vlachy, "Remarks on the Productive Age."
132. Most emphatically, peers in science need not be age peers. A century ago,
William Perkins was, at 23, the world authority on dyes just as a Joshua Lederberg
or a Murray Gell-Mann were authorities in their subjects at a comparable age today.
This sort of thing should lead us to abandon the practice, common in the jargon of
sociology and psychology, of having the word "peers" refer elliptically only to "age
peers." As everyone else seems to know, "peer" refers to one who is of equal standing
with another, in whatever terms that standing is gauged: political rank, esteem,
authority, and age.
Bibliography
562
Bibliography
Bibliography
563
564
Bibliography
"Practical Problems and the Uses of Social Science." [With Edward C. Devereux, Jr.] Trans-action 1 (1964): 18-21.
"Foreword" to The Technological Society, by Jacques Ellul. New York: A.
Knopf, 1964.
"The Environment of the Innovating Organization." In The Creative Organization, edited by Gary Steiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
"On the History and Systematics of Sociological Theory" and "On Sociological
Theories of the Middle Range." In Robert K. Merton, On Theoretical Sociology. New York: The Free Press, 1967.
*"The Matthew Effect in Science: the Reward and Communication Systems
of Science." Science 199 (5 January 1968): 55-63.
"Observations on the Sociology of Science." Japan-American Forum 14 (April
1968): 18-28.
"Seminars Without Constraint." The Columbia University Forum 11 (Winter
1968): 38-39.
*"Behavior Patterns of Scientists." Copublished in American Scientist 57
(Spring 1969): 1-23, and American Scholar 38 (Spring 1969): 197-225.
"Insiders and Outsiders: An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge." 1st ed.
in Conspectus of Indian Society, edited by R. N. Saxena. Agra, India:
Satish Book Enterprise, 1971. 2d ed. in Essays on Modernization of Underdeveloped Societies. Bombay, India: Thacker & Co., Ltd., 1971.
*"Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge." 3d ed.
American Journal of Sociology 77 (July 1972): 9-47.
"The Precarious Foundations of Detachment in Sociology." In The Phenomenon
of Sociology, edited by Edward A. Tiryakian. New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1971.
*"The Competitive Pressures ( 1): The Race for Priority." [With Richard
Lewis] Impact of Science on Society 21 (1971): 151-61.
*"Patterns of Evaluation in Science: Institutionalisation, Structure and Functions
of the Referee System." [With Harriet Zuckerman] Minerva 9 (January
1971): 66-100.
*"Age, Aging, and Age Structure in Science." [With Harriet Zuckerman] In
Aging and Society. Vol. 3, A Sociology of Age Stratification, edited by
Matilda W. Riley, Marilyn Johnson, and Anne Foner. New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 1972.
"On Discipline-Building: The Paradoxes of George Sarton." [With Arnold
Thackray] Isis 63 (1972): 473-95.
Agassi, Joseph. "The Origins of the Royal Society." Organon 7 (1970): 11735.
---."Revolutions in Science, Occasional or Permanent?" Organon 3 (1966):
47-61.
- - - . "Towards an Historiography of Science." History and Theory, suppl.
2. The Hague: Mouton, 1963.
Baldamus, W. "The Role of Discoveries in Social Science." In The Rules of the
Bibliography
565
566
Bibliography
Bibliography
567
568
Bibliography
Bibliography
569
Hetherington, Robert W. "Local and Cosmopolitan Physicians." Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology (February 1971 ), 32-46.
Hill, Christopher. Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.
- - - . "The Intellectual Origins of the Royal Society-London or Oxford."
Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 23 (December 1968):
144-56.
- - - . "Puritanism, Capitalism and the Scientific Revolution." Past & Present
29 (1964): 88-97.
Hirsch, Walter. Scientists in American Society. New York: Random House,
1968.
Hooykaas, R. "Answer to Dr. Bainton's Comment on 'Science and Reformation'." Journal of World History 3 (1956): 781-84.
- - - . Humanisme, Science et Reforme. Leiden, 1958.
- - - . Religion and the Rise of Modern Science. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972.
- - - . "Science and Reformation." Journal of World History 3 (1956):
109-39.
- - - . "Science and Religion in the Seventeenth Century." Free University
Quarterly 1:169-83.
Kaplan, Norman, ed. Science and Society. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965.
- - - . "Sociology of Science." In Handbook of Modern Sociology, edited by
R. E. L. Faris. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964.
Kearney, Hugh F., ed. Origins of the Scientific Revolution. London: Longmans,
1964.
- - - . "Puritanism and Science: Problems of Definition." Past & Present 31
(July 1965): 104-10.
- - - . "Puritanism, Capitalism and the Scientific Revolution." Past & Present
28 (July 1964): 81-101.
Kemsley, Douglas S. "Religious Influences in the Rise of Modern Science: A
Review and Criticism,, Particularly of the 'Protestant-Puritan Ethic' Theory."
Annals of Science 24 (1968): 199-226.
King, M. D. "Reason, Tradition and the Progressiveness of Science." History
and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 10 (1971): 3-32.
Klima, Rolf. "Einige Widerspriiche im Rollen-Set des Soziologen." In Thesen
zur Kritik der Soziologie, edited by B. Schafers. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969,
pp. 80-95.
- - - . "Scientific Knowledge and Social Control in Science." In Social Processes of Scientific Development, edited by Richard D. Whitley. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, in press.
- - - . "Theoretical Pluralism, Methodological Dissension and the Role of
the Sociologist: The West German Case." Social Science Information 11
(1972): 69-108.
Kocher, Paul Harold. Science and Religion in Elizabethan England. San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1953.
Krober, Giinter, and Lorf, Marianne, eds. Wissen'schaft: Studien zu ihrer Geschichte, Theorie und Organisation. Translated from the Russian. Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag, 1972.
- - - , eds. Wissenschaftliches Schopfertum. Translated from the Russian.
Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1972.
570
Bibliography
Bibliography
571
Menzel, Herbert. "Planned and Unplanned Scientific Communication." Reprinted from Proceedings, International Conference on Scientific Information, 1959, in The Sociology of Science, edited by Bernard Barber and Walter
Hirsch. New York: Free Press, 1962.
---."Planning the Consequences of Unplanned Action in Scientific Communication." In Communication in Science, edited by A. de Reuck and
J. Knight. London: J. & A. Churchill, 1967.
Mirsky, E. M. "Science Studies in The USSR: History, Problems, Prospects."
Science Studies 2 (1972): 281-94.
Moscovici, Serge, "L'histoire des sciences et le science des historiens." Archives
572
Bibliography
Bibliography
573
574
Bibliography
Bibliography
575
tZuckerman, Harriet A. "Interviewing an Ultra-Elite." Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (Summer 1972): 159-75.
t - - - . "Knowledge and Social Structure." In Society Today. Del Mar, Calif.:
CRM Books, 1970. Chapter 28.
t - - - . "Nobel Laureates in Science: Patterns of Productivity, Collaboration
and Authorship." American Sociological Review 32 (1967): 391-403.
t - - - . "Patterns of Name-ordering among Authors of Scientific Papers: A
Study of Social Symbolism and its Ambiguity." American Journal of Sociology 74 (November 1968): 276-91.
t - - - . Scientific Elite: Studies of Nobel Laureates in the United States.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, in press.
t - - - . "The Sociology of the Nobel Prize." Scientific American 217, no. 5
(1967): 25-33.
t - - - . "Stratification in American Science." Sociological Inquiry, Spring
1970, pp. 235-57.
t - - - . "Women and Blacks in American Science and Engineering." In
Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, edited by Daniel Kevles.
In press.
tZuckerman, Harriet A., and Merton, Robert K. "Age, Aging, and Age Structure in Science." In Aging and Society. Vol. 3, A Theory of Age Stratification, edited by Matilda W. Riley, Marilyn Johnson, and Anne Foner. New
York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972.
t - - - . "Patterns of Evaluation in Science: Institutionalization, Structure and
Functions of the Referee System." Minerva 9 (January 1971): 66-100.
Index of Names
578
Index of Names
Index of Names
Delbriick, Max, 128, 340, 455n, 510, 517
DeMoivre, Abraham, 199
De Morgan, Augustus, 315n, 353n, 392n,
404, 406
Dennis, Wayne, 512, 549n
Denny, Reuel, 113
Derham, William, 241n
De Reuck, Anthony, 470n
Desai, A. R., 106n
Descartes, Rene, 196, 313, 344, 398, 430-31
De Villamil, R., 249n
Dewar, James, 334, 336
Dewey, John, 87
Diamond, Sigmund, 53
Dicey, Albert Venn, 354
Digby, Sir Kenelm, 434
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 32
Dirac, P. A. M., 528n
Dobrov, Gennady, xxx
Dobson, Richard R., 227n
Dolby, R. G. A., xi, xvii n, xxx
Douglass, Frederick, 112
Downey, Kenneth, xi n
Drake, Stillman, 287n, 298n
Draper, John W., 180
DuBois, W. E. B., 134
Du Bois-Reymond, Emil, 354
Duesenberry, James S., 442n
Duhem, Pierre, 109n, 271n, 354
Duncan, David, 395n
Duncan, Otis Dudley, xv n
Dunnington, Waldo G., 357n, 363n
Durkheim, Emile, xiii, 11, 17, 23n, 24-25,
31, 36n, 51-53, 59, 265n, 290n
Dury, Jean, 240n
Dzierson, Father Johann, 299
Edge, David 0., xxix
Edwards, G. Franklin, 136n
Eisenstadt, S. N., 543n
Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 464n
Einstein, Albert, 102, 120, 165, 275, 328,
340, 354, 513
Elkins, Stanley M., 136
Ellis, Robert L., 297n, 344n
Enders, John, 455n
Engels, Friedrich, lOn, 13, 14, 19-21, 28,
29n,30, 117n, 153, 154n,354
Epstein, Cynthia, 116, 412n
'Espinasse, Margaret, 287n
Euler, Leonhard, 189,289
Fabricius, Johannes, 287
Falk, G., 511
Faraday, Michael, 185, 189,288,292, 298,
337,435-36,521
Faris, Robert E. L., xxvi n
Farr, Hollon W., 99n
Farrer, J. A., 310n
Farrington, Benjamin, 347n, 348n
Ferguson, Adam, 394
Fermat, Pierre de, 313
Fermi, Enrico, 520
Fernandez, Carlos Graef, 304n
579
5 80
Index of Names
Index of Names
Kapitza, Peter, 334, 340
Kaplan, Norman, xxv, xxvi
Kaplan, Samuel, 304n
Kassab, Jane, 461n
Kearney, Hugh F., 190
Keebler, R. W., 508n
Keller, Helen, 405n, 406n
Kellermann, Hermann, 109n, 271n
Kelley, H. H., 456n
Kelvin, Lord (Sir William Thomson), 38n,
294n,301,304,316,359-61,367-68,384
Kendall, Patricia L., 305n, 51 On
Keniston, Heyward, 480n
Kennan, Stella, 475n
Kent, Donald P., 108n
Kepler, Johann, 235, 401, 535
Kessler, M. M., 475n, 476n
Keynes, J. M., 37n, 512
Kherkhof, Karl, 109n, 271n
Kilson, Martin, 117-18
King, Gregory, 344
King, M. D., xvii n, xxviii, 6
Kitt (Rossi), Alice, xxi n, 4, 108n
Knappen, M. M., 235n
Knickerbocker, William S., 40ln
Knight, Frank H., 264n
Knight, Julie, 470n
Koch, Robert, 360
Koestler, Arthur, 37n, 310n
Koller, Carl, 386n
Kornhauser, William, xxv, xxvi
Korten, Frances, 474n
Koyre, Alexandre, 303n, 372n
Kracauer, Siegfried, 128-29
Krieck, Ernest, 102, 256n, 258n, 259n
Kroeber, A. L., 125n, 354
Kronick, D. A., 463n
Kubie, Lawrence S., 311, 319-20, 328
Kuhn, Thomas S., xvii, xxviii, xxx, 174, 513,
514n,554-55
Kusch, Polykarp, 536n
Lagrange, J. L., 200, 289, 304, 437
Lakatos, Imre, 554n
Lamb, Willis, 330
Langmuir, Irving, 275
Lankester, Edwin, 232n, 233n, 241n
Laplace, P. S., 288, 304, 312, 313n, 437
Larmor, Sir Joseph, 357n
La Rue, Linda, 114
Lavoisier, Antoine, 288, 299, 364n
Lazarsfeld, Paul F., x, xxi, xxx, 35n, 108n,
216,374n,375n
Le Bon, Gustav, 390n, 394
Lecky, William E. H., 243, 248n
Lecuyer, Bernard, xxx
Lederberg,Joshua, 559n
Lee, T. D., 148, 169
Leeuwenhoek,Anton von,205,298,317n
Legendre, A. M., 288, 313, 363
Lehman, H. C., 511-12
Leibniz, G. W., 205, 214, 287, 353
581
5 82
Index of Names
Index of Names
Perry, Ralph Barton, 402n
Peters, C. A. F., 402n
Petit, Pierre, 467
Petras, John W., 99n
Pettit, Gabriel, 109n, 271n, 272n
Petty, Sir William, x, 187, 241,252, 344
Pierce, P. B., 214
Pinder, Wilhelm, 536
Planc~~ax,103, 109,256,271,333,340
Plato, 24
Pledge, H. T., 210
Plot, Robert, 196n
Poincare, Henri, 407
Poisson, S. D., 206
Polanyi, ~ichael, xvi, xvii n, 100, 101n, 136,
461,477,491n,494
Pollack, Donald K., 507n
Popper, Karl, 182, 554
Popper-Lynkeus, Josef, 387n, 405n
Porter, R. J., 463n, 470n
Price, Derek J. de Soli a, xxvi, xxix, xxx,
150,449n,457n,470n,499n,505,507n,
508n, 529n
Price, Don K., 113
Price, W. H., 344n
Priestley, Joseph, 189,292,299,317,362,406
Prinz, A. G., 493
Prokhorov, Aleksandr, 330
Rabb, Theodore K., 190
Raffel, Stanley, 492n
Rainoff, T. J., 192n
Ramanujan, Srinivasa, 305
Ramsay, Sir William, 189, 291n, 294n, 334
Ramsey, Frank, 512
Ranke, Leopold von, 513n
Rapoport, David, 396n
Ravetz, J. R., xxx
Ra~John, 189,230n,232,233n,236n,238,
247n
Rayleigh, J. W. S., 291n, 294n, 318n, 334,
457
Reader, George G., 305n, 510n
Redding, J. S., 127
Reitz, Jeffrey G., 504n
Rey, Abel, 214, 354
Rice, S. A., 192n
Richet, Charles, 272n, 304
Richter, ~aurice N., 227n
Rickert, Heinrich, 34n
Riesman, David, 113, 385
Rigaud, S. J., 199n, 232n, 362n
Riley, ~atilda White, 417, 497n, 498, 501n,
512n,515n,524n,536,543n
Roberts, Harry, 403
Robertson, Adam, 394
Robin, J., 275n
Roby, Pamela A., 105n
Rodewald, Otto, 244n
Roe, Anne, 220, 290n, 530n
Rogoff, Natalie, 510n
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 328
Rose, Arnold, 128
583
584
Index of Names
Index of Names
Weld, Charles R., 362n, 463n
Wells, W. P., 559n
Werskey, P. G., xv n
West, S. Stewart, xvii n
Wharton, Vernon, 135
Wheeler, William Morton, xiv
Whewell, William, 206, 249n
White, A. D., 180
White, R. W., 396n
Whitehead, Alfred North, xiv, 250n, 251,
252n
Whitley, Richard, xxx, 495n, 522n, 556n
Whyte, L. L., 410n
Whyte, William, 425
Wiener, Norbert, 304, 316n, 333-34, 361
Wilder, R. L., 411
Wilensky, Harold L., 523n
Wilkerson, Doxey A., 128
Williams, G., 455n
Williams, L. Pearce, 189
585
Index of Subjects
588
Index of Subjects
Index of Subjects
(see Correspondence theory); selection
of, 39; social genesis of, 17, 24-26
Causal relations, between thought and
existential basis, 12
Causal system, distinguished from
meaningful cultural system, 33
Centrality, and superiority, 108
Change, social: and changes in science,
328; culturally induced, 54; and
"cultural mentalities" concept, 139-40;
and development of Insider and
Outsider doctrines, 103-12; in foci of
interest in science, 140; and formal
sociology, 66; and growth of sociology
of knowledge, 99-100; and idea systems,
30; in institutionalized values, 231; rates
of, 22-23; in relations of science to
cultural and social contexts, 174
Character structure of leading scientists,
453-55
Charismatic_role, 452-53
Chauvinism, 109; and emergence of
scientific journals, 466-67; and priority
disputes, 314; and universalism, 270n.
See also Ethnocentrism; Racial chauvinism
Chemistry, emphasis on utilitarianism in,
257n
Chinese language, and concepts, 25-26
Chinese thought, ancient, 17
Citation analysis, xxix, 451, 508n; and
age-stratified receptivity to new ideas,
514-15; and codification studies, 508-9;
computerized, 177; and foci of scientific
interest, 556
Civilization, concept of, xv
Clan structure, and categories of thought,
17
Class, social: in ideational and sensate
cultures, 18, 149n; as social base of
knowledge, 12; and false consciousness,
102; and functions and dysfunctions of
social system, 48; and ideology, 14-15,
29; and late bloomers, 428-29; and
socially unattached intellectuals, 37,
12Q-31; thought as reflection of, 28-31.
See also Social location
Class consciousness, xxi. See also False
consciousness
Class interests: and Calvinism, 29n; and
ideologies, 14-15; and knowledge, 28-31
Class society, and justice, 19
Class structure, and functionalization of
ideas, 14-15
Class struggle, 14-15
Clients of social research: and cost of
applied research, 89; and misstatement
of practical problem, 82-83; social
structures of, 78; and utilization of
social science research, 77-79
Climate of opinion, 12, 22
Codification of functional analysis, xxi
Codification of scientific knowledge: and
age-specific productivity, 51Q-13; and
age-specific receptivity to new ideas,
589
590
Index of Subjects
Index of Subjects
Dissensus in science, xxix
Distrust: intergroup, 8-10; reciprocal, 10,
87; and universes of discourse, 10
Diversity of vocabulary, patterned
differences in, 118
Division of labor, 59
Doctorates in science, 499, 500
Dogma, and hypotheses, 4
"Dominant" themes of culture, 18, 149
Duplication in research, 358-59, 377-81,
45Q-52. See also Multiple discoveries
Dysfunctions: of gerontocracy, 537-38; of
group affiliation for knowledge, 122;
latent, xxi; of social arrangements, 48
Eclectics, 57
Economic activities, interdependence of, 95
Economic base: of applied social research,
75-76, 88-89, 93; of Darwin's theory
of selection, 37; and ideology, 29;
interaction with superstructure, 29-30,
117; of knowledge, 19-22; and natural
science, 2Q-22; of Puritan interest in
science, 248; and rates of change
hypothesis, 22-23; of scientific
development, 35-36, 178; and sociological
research, 218-19; and thought, 28-31
Economic organization, and development of
sociol9gy, 49
Economic utility of science, 184, 268
Editors of journals: allocation of
manuscripts to, 482-85; as gatekeepers,
521n, 522; and rank of authors, 495n;
and rejection criteria, 473; relationships
with authors, 492; role of, 463, 469
Education, and age stratification, 501-3,
545-46
"Educative" research, 90
Effectiveness, measurement of, 85
Effective scope, 375
Efficiency, multiple discoveries and. See
Multiple discoveries, as "wasteful
duplication"
"Egalitarian" model of allocation of
referees to authors, 484
"Egocentric predicament," 105n
Ego strength of laureates, 453-54
Egotism, and conflicts over priority, 290,
340-41
Election forecasts of 1948, 76n, 96n-97n
Elegaic sense of nonrecognition, 421
Elitism: and access to new knowledge,
102-3; and gerontocracy, 539; impulse
structure of elites and, 32; and Insider
doctrine, 103
Emanationist theory. See Culture mentalities
theory
Empirical validation of culture mentalities
theory, 140, 146, 156-63, 171
Empiricism, 167n; and intuitions, 27; and
monastic asceticism, 237n; and policy
advice, 72, 73; in polling forecasts, 76n;
and Puritan interest in science, 237-40,
591
592
Index of Subjects
Index of Subjects
History of science, 41; and Freud's interest
in priority, 386-87, 390-91; and
independent discoveries, 352-56;
institutionalization of referee system,
462-70; and integration of religion and
science, 246-50; and priority conflicts,
286-90, 329, 334-38, 392n; and reward
system, 297-305; and secularization
process, 242--46; and shift of foci of
intellectual interest, 240--42; and
Weltanschauung, xiii
History of sociology, 53; and triviality, 60
Honorific recognition, 415, 420-22; cut-off
points for, 429; and excellence as
performance, 433-35; and excellence as
quality, 429
Hostility toward science, 266; and
esotericism, 263-64; and norms of pure
science, 261-63; and organized
.
skepticism, 264-66; and relations between
science and society, 267--68; sources of,
253-57. See also Anti-intellectualism
"Hot fields," in science, 331
Humility norm, 170; and priorities race,
383-85; and reward system, 303-5
Hypotheses, and dogma, 4
Iconoclasm, 122
Iconography of fame, 301
Idealism, in sensate culture, 18, 148
Idealistic mentality, 18, 145, 152-53, 164,
183
Ideal patterns, 220; of relations between
basic and applied science, 94
Ideas: and cryptomnesia, 402-12;
debunking of, 10; determination by
social substrata, 9-10; diffusion of,
129-30; and history, 30; and interaction
with existential factors, 32; new,
receptivity to, 514-15; non-logicity of,
155; role in history of, 65; and social
charige, 30; source of, 164-65. See also
Thought
Ideational cui ture, 17, 144, 166; leading
classes in, 149n; rate of scientific
development in, 157
Identification of talent, 423-27, 549-50;
and psychological tests, 423
Identity: institutional, 51-52; search for, 51
Ideological analysis, 10-11
Ideological conflict, and monopoly of access
to knowledge, 6
Ideological function, 37-3 8
Ideological superstructure, material bases
of, 19-22
Ideologies, 12; and action, 237; autonomy
of, 29-30; of caste societies, 272;
chauvinist, 109; and class interests,
14-15, 29; and cognitive agreement,
65-66; economic base of, 20; and
functionalization of thought, 100; and
history, 30; and knowledge, 19n; and
law, 19; and role of ideas, 9; of science
593
594
Index of Subjects
Index of Subjects
35-36; and hypothesis of multiples, 355;
and Insider doctrine, 102; and neglect of
sociology of science, 216-17; and proletariat perception of truth, 102n; and
relative autonomy of institutional spheres,
152-53; and sociology, 52, 55; and unity
of social movements, 114; and universalism in science, 271n
Master-apprentice relationship, 521, 534-35
Material basis. See Economic base
Material interest, and class interest, 15
Materialism in sensate culture, 18, 148
Materialist conception: of history, 117; of
knowledge, 146
Material rewards, and recognition, 440
Mathematics: and natural phenomena, 165;
knowledge of, 22
Matrix of concepts, in language, 24
Matthew effect, 284, 416, 439-59; and
allocation of scientific resources, 457-58;
and codification, 516; and collaboration,
443-44; and communication system in
science, 447-50; and multiples, 444-47,
450-52; and role retention, 531; social
and psychological bases of, 452-57; and
social selection, 458-59
Means and ends, 86, 87
Mechanistic biology, 145, 150-51
Mechanistic thought, and new individualism, 32
Medicine: advice in, 72-73; and communism, 274n; conflicts in, 288; resistance to
change in, 372n
Meliorist, 42
Mental productions. See Thought
Meritocracy, 105n
Metaphysical dualism, 23
"Methodological solipsism," 105n
Methodology, 162; of applied social
research, 97-98; and attitudes toward
science, 25 5; of historical inquiry, 63;
and individual differences among scientists, 349; qualitative and quantitative,
159-60; and sociology of science, 212-13;
vs. substantive sociology, 62-64
Microsociology of science, 67, 143, 154;
and emanationist theory, 147-51
Middle class: orientation toward blacks,
108n; and science, 21n
Milieu of research, 373-75
Military institutions, and science, 39n, 178
Military technique: and hostility toward
science, 261-62; interactions with science,
xvi, 141, 184, 204-9
Misplaced concreteness, fallacy of, 131
Mobility, 445; and gatekeepers, 522; and
role-sequence and role-allocation, 523-28
Modal patterns: of entry and exit, 500; and
persistence of role patterning, 528
Models of thought, and multiple group
affiliation, 16-17
Mode of presentation of scientific work,
454-56
Modes of action, and sentiments, 237
595
596
Index of Subjects
Object-Interpreter relation, 11
Objectivity: of Outsiders, 124-25, 127; as
social emergent, 25; of social science
research, public image of, 75-76
"Oligarchical" model of allocation of
referees to authors, 484
Ontological assumptions: existential base
of, 19; of Insiders, 110
Ontology, of culture mentalities, 144-45
Opportunism, and pragmatism, 38n
Opportunity structure of science, 443, 531,
548-49
Oppression. See Racism
Organismic thought, 32
Organizational gaps between research and
policy, 92-94
Organizational prestige, estimates of, 108-9
Organizational problems, and utilization of
applied social research, 74
Organization of policy research, 77-79
Originality, emphasis on: deviant responses
to, 317-20; and fraud, 309-12; plagiary
as response to, 312-16; and prematqre
publication, 316-17; and priority, 305
Orthodoxies in sociology: and conflict,
57-58; and heterodoxies, 69; and recognition, 433
"Other-directed men," 428
Outgroup: and rivalry between schools in
science, 44-45; selective perceptions of,
56. See also Outsider doctrine; Outsiders
Outsider doctrine, 122-23
Outsiders: converted, 111; and distinction
between "acquaintance with" and "knowledge about," 135-36; foci of interest of,
106-7; incapacity to comprehend alien
groups, 106; incompetence of, 105-6;
Insider attitudes toward, 121-22; intellectual interchange between Insiders and,
129-30; and perception of social forces,
250n; role in social and historical
inquiry, 125-29; structural concept of,
112-21
Outsider truths and untruths, 101
"Over-achievers," 424-25
Overlooked variables, 94-95
Oversocialized conception of man, 119
Palimpsestic syndrome, 123n
Paradigm: distinguished from theory, xix,
xxviii; in Kuhnian sense, xxviii, xxx, 513,
555; in Mertonian sense, xxiv, xxvi, xxviii,
7, 12-13, 417; and "normal" or "revolutionary" science, xxxi; for research on
cognitive and social structures of science,
418; of social roles of scientists, 42-46.
See also Paradigm for sociology of
knowledge; Paradigm for sociology of
science
Paradigm for sociology of knowledge, xm,
xx, xxi, 4-5, 6, 226; and existential basis
Index of Subjects
of knowledge, 13-18; and functions of
knowledge, 35-36; outline of, 12-13;
purpose of, 11-12; related to research
problems, 36-40; and relations of knowledge to existential basis, 28-35; and types
of knowledge, 18-28
Paradigm for sociology of science, xi, xxiii,
xxvi, xxix, xxx, 4; and age research, 417;
and commitment to norms, xix; and communication studies, xxvii; and Matthew
effect, 284; and other variables, 415; and
priorities, 282; and research, xxx-xxxi,
281
Paradox of neglect of sociology of science,
xxii
Parascientific roles, 519
Particularism: between authors and referees,
480-81; and universalism, 270-73
Patterned differentials: in access to knowledge, 102-3; in perceptions and perspectives, 118-19, 121
Patterned expectations, and role retention,
532
Peer review, 522
Peers, not merely age peers, 559n
"Perfectionist" type, 455n
Personality: and competition, 333; and
concept of excellence, 423-24; and culture mentality, 145; of eminent scientists,
458-59; and organizational structure,
143; and priority disputes, 290-91;
related to social structure, 146-47
Perspectives: age-patterned, 536--37, 556;
determination of, 22; imputations of, 39;
and location of existential basis of
thought, 17
Persuasion: as function of applied social
research, 79-80; moral dimensions of,
85-88; by rhetoric, 68
Ph.D's, age of, in selected fields, 504, 505t
Phenomenology of society, 224
Philosophy, and culture mentalities, 145
Philosophy of science, 41
Plagiary, 397-98; as response to emphasis
on originality, 312-16; and role of
referee, 492-93; unconscious (see
Cryptomnesia)
Polarization of society; and claims to truth,
100; and emergence of Insider doctrine,
110-11; and experiment and natural
history in sociology, 67; and interchange
between Insiders and Outsiders, 129-30;
in sociology and social psychology, 68;
and syntheses, 129-30
Polemics: and allocation of intellectual
resources, 55; and cognitive agreement
and value disagreement, 65-66; experimental sociology vs. natural history, 67;
formal vs. concrete sociology, 66--67; and
imbalances in scientific inquiry, 58; lone
scholar vs. research team, 64; microscopic vs. macroscopic sociology, 67;
597
598
Index of Subjects
Index of Subjects
validation, 440; and self-image, 304
Public interpretation of reality, 110-11
Public opinion of science, 169, 195, 218,
225-26. See also Hostility toward
science; Public image
Public opinion research, 92
Pure science, 179, 225-26; and antiintellectualism, 257; autonomy of, 185;
and military problem-solving, 205-7
Puritanism: norms of, 227; and scientific
development, 140, 177-78, 180-84, 18690, 224, 227-53
"Puzzle-solving," xxx
Quantitative analysis: and culture mentalities theory, 156-63; fallacy in, 160; of
foci of interest in science, 140, 191-203;
in military research, 207-9; of rejection
rates of scientific journals, 476-91; in
sociology of science, xiv, 177-90
"Quantophrenia," 159-60
Racial chauvinism, 111-12
Racial identity, 111-12
Racism, 255; and Black Insider doctrine,
110-12, 117-18; and chauvinism, 110;
dehumanizing consequences of, 126; and
Nazi Insider doctrine, 102-3; and science,
255-57
Radical relativism, 23
Ratchet effect: and retention of research
role, 531-32; and reward, 442
Rationalism, 164; and empiri1=ism, 33; and
Puritan interest in science, 238-40
Rationality norm, 225; and science in Nazi
Germany, 256, 257
Reality, social: gaps in coping with, xx;
and ideational culture, 144; and knowledge, xxi, xxii; in sensate culture, 144-45,
148; shared, and values, 146-47; and
thought, 165; and value-commitments,
148
Reason. See Rationalism
Reciprocity: between applied and basic
research, 71; institutionalized, 101; in
master-apprentice relations, 535; between
science and social and cultural structure,
176
Recognition, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxxi, 283; and
access to knowledge, 440; accumulation
of, 416; and authority structure, 552-53;
belated, 429, 435-37; and codification,
515-16; of evokers of excellence, 432-33;
failure of (see Elegaic sense of nonrecognition); functions of, 435-38;
importance of, 416; limitations on, 435;
and Matthew effect, 439-59; and motivation, 468n; and priority disputes, 293-97;
and productivity, 469, 474; and referee
system, 416-17; related to excellence,
425-35; self-reinforcing, 416; and social
599
600
Index of Subjects
Index of Subjects
Scientific knowledge: cross-cultural accumulation of, 169; distinguished from other
kinds of knowledge, 3; foci of interest in,
554-58; organization of, xvii; and scientific growth, xvii; selective accumulation
of, 166-70, 172; and social structure of
science, xix-xx. See also Codification of
scientific knowledge
Scientific method, and Puritanism, 235
Scientific papers: and foci of interest, 196200; format of, 326; and Matthew effect,
443-47
Scientific problems. See Problems
Scientific productivity. See Productivity of
scientists
Scientific revolution, xix, xxviii, xxx
Scientific roles, 519-37; allocation of, and
age, 503; inventory of, 519-22; mechanisms of attrition and retention of, 52837; and motivation for collaboration,
549; sequence and allocation of, 523,
524t-525t, 526-28. See also Role(s)
Scientific specialties, growth of, xii, xxvii,
xxviii
Scientific theory: and applied social research, 9~97; long- and short-run
changes in, 150-51, 167--68
Scientific thought, social determination of,
20--21
Scientific truth, criteria of, 171
Scientific writings, as sociological indicators,
156-63. See also Collaboration; Joint
publication; Publication; Scientific
journals
Scientism, 164, 232n
Scientists: age distribution of, 500, 502; and
chauvinism, 109; communication among,
xxvi-xxvii, 274, 447-50, 495, 557; educational composition of, 501-3; and
eponymy, 215, 227, 282-83, 298-302;
focalizing function of, 452-53; individual
capacities of, 348-49; internalization of
norms of science by, 269; in Nazi
Germany, 255-57; number of, 498-99;
reading practices of, 448-49; relations
with laymen, 277; social roles of, 41-46;
and their reference groups and individuals, 374-75; values of, 84, 225-26. See
also Ambivalence of scientists; Behavior
patterns of scientists; Ethos of science;
Normative structure of science
Scribal culture, and secrecy, 464
Sects: and modes of thought, 17; rivalry
between, 45
Secularization of science, 242-46; and
rivalry between schools, 44-45
Segregation. See Racism
Selection, theory of, 37
Selective cumulation of scientific knowledge, xv, 151, 166-70, 172
Selective perceptions in social conflict, 56
Self, and social role, 42
Self-confirming stereotypes, 56
601
602
Index of Subjects
Priority disputes
Social conflict over styles of sociological
work, 55-69
Social context of science, xii-xiii, xviii, 47,
175-90
Social control: and propaganda, 84-85; of
science, 218
Social discrimination, and black Insider
doctrine, 111-12
Social ecology, in production, 66
Social epistemology, 19, 25, 41, 107, 110,
112, 123; total Insider and Outsider
doctrines of, 113-21
Social functions: of knowledge, 35; of
Matthew effect, 447-50; of recognition,
438; and social role, 42
Social illusion, existential bases of, 22
Social institutions, interdependence of, 176
Social interaction: between sociologists, 49;
and scientific discovery, 346-47
Social interests, and knowledge, 23
Socialization: and access to knowledge,
106; adult, xxii; age-patterned process of,
546; and collaboration, 546; and scientific
roles, 520; for scientific work, 500, 521
Social location: and access to knowledge,
6; and cognitive perspectives, 118-19;
and knowledge, 122-29, 132-36; of men
of knowledge, 171; and patterned differences in perspectives and behavior, 119n;
and problem selection, 107. See also
Class, social
Index of Subjects
93; scientific gaps between policy and,
90-92; and scientific theory, 94-97;
situational context of utilization of,
79-82; status of, 70; and value frameworks, 83-86
Social scientists: functions of research
originated by, 80-82; role of, 133
Social selection, 290-91
Social solipsism, and individual solipsism,
105
Social space, 36
Social status: and nonlogicity of ideas, 155;
salient, 111, 116; and social role, 42; of
social scientists, 77; and utilization of
applied social research, 74
Social strata: cleavages between, 101; of
intellectuals, 120. See also Class, social
Social stratification of science: and collaboration, 547-50; and development of
sociology, 49; and role-retention and
role-attrition patterns, 531
Social structures: and attitudes toward new
unanticipated facts, 44; and Black
Insider doctrine, 111-12; and cognitive
structure, 506-19; and development of
science, 156; and doctrines of utility of
science, 186; and foci of attention in
science, 37-38; of Insiders and Outsiders,
112-21; and knowledge, 23, 351n; related
to culture and personality, 146-47;
sadistic, 131-32; and science, xix-xx,
267-68; social circle in, 34; and sociology, 49
Social time, 36
Social utility, and development of science,
175
Social values, and growth of science, 223
Social welfare, and Puritan interest in
science, 234-35
Sociological community, 5
Sociological conflict. See Social conflict
Sociological euphemism, 131-32
Sociological history of sociology, 49; need
for, 54; and triviality, 61
Sociologism, repudiation of, 23-24, 119n
Sociology: as autonomous discipline, 51;
choice of research subjects in, 59-60;
development phases of, 49-54; differentiation from other disciplines, 50-51;
formation of schools of, 51, 52; and
institutional legitimacy, 51-52; national
comparisons in, 55; priority disputes in,
288-89; reconsolidation with other disciplines, 53; social contexts of, 47; social
processes internal to, 54; vs. social
psychology, 68; status of, 286. See also
American sociology; Sociology of knowledge; Sociology of science; Styles of
sociological work
Sociology of knowledge: antecedents of,
7-8; Copernican revolution in, 11; generalities in, 47-48; and Insider doctrine
(see Insider doctrine); invalidation of
603
theory in, 31; orientation of, 6-7; paradigm for (see Paradigm for sociology of
knowledge); related to sociology of
science, xiii, 3; social context of, 8-11;
and social problems, 99-102; status of,
xiii, 40, 47-49; and statistical techniques,
160
Sociology of science: continuity in, xii;
definition of, xiii; development of, xiiixviii; and development of science, 13941; "emanationist" theory of, 142-72;
legitimacy of, 223-24; methodology used
for, 212-13; and multiple independent
investigations, 213-15; neglect of, xxii,
211-20; quantitative indicators in, xiv,
156-63; reflexive nature of, xxii (see also
Self-exemplifying hypothesis); related to
sociology of knowledge, 3; as specialty,
ix, xii, xxiv; situation of, xi, xxix-xxxi,
139, 141, 173-74, 210-20, 286, 498
Sociology of sociology, 5, 47-69, 99n
"Sociology without society," 67
Soft sciences: citation measures of, 508n;
distinguished from hard sciences, 507n
Solidarity within social movements, 101
Solipsism, 105
Soviet Union: and national claims to
priority, 296-97; sociology in, 55; sociology of science in, xxx; and universalism,
271n
Space. See Time and space
Specialization, and rivalry, 51. See also
Scientific roles
Sponsored mobility, 522
Status: and attitudes toward new facts, 44;
of author relative to referee, 489, 490t,
491; and "forty-first chair," 440-43;
functional autonomy of, 136; functionally irrelevant, 116n; and jointly authored
papers, 446-47; and patterned differences
in perspectives, 119; and rates of
acceptance in scientific journals, 486,
487t, 488, 489t; of referees of scientific
journals, 478, 483; single, vs. status sets,
113-21; and submission of manuscripts,
479-82. See also Achieved status; Age
status; Ascribed statuses; Status deference; Status judges; Status sets
Status competition: between authors and
referees, 489; and controversy in sociology, 56
Status deference, 489-90
Status differentiation, in social conflict, 57
Status judges, 340, 434; choice of, 422;
criteria of, 501; and institutional legitimacy of sociology, 51; and Matthew
effect, 439-43; social role of, 460. See
also Editors of journals; Referee system
Status sets: and Insider and Outsider
doctrines, 113-21; and redefining of
statuses, 120
Status solidarity of author and referee, 489
604
Index of Subjects
Index of Subjects
Universities: in Nazi Germany, 256; and
Puritanism, 239, 247; and reward system,
301, 458; and structural influences on
knowledge, 351n; structure of, and
professor-student relations, 143
Unwitting motives, 29
Utility of science, 52, 186; inventory of,
183-85; and Puritan attitude, 237, 248,
251; and racism, 256
Utilization of applied social research,
92-94; and organization, 77-79; situational context of, 79-82
Validation: criteria and methods of, 9n, 11,
25, 27, 134; limits of, 22; and rivalry,
45; and scientific theory, 151; sensate
method of, 163-64; social structure
warranties of, 120
Value-constants of policy maker, 83-84
Value disagreement and cognitive agreement, 65-66
Value framework and policy alternatives,
93
Value-free research, 86--87
Value-preferences and sense perceptions, 8
Values: and approaches to social reality,
148; and attitudes toward science, 25457; autonomous, of scholarship, 134;
commitment to, 134; as cultural base of
knowledge, 12; ideologies and actions as
products of, 237; and Insider doctrine,
106-7; of open communication, 465-68;
of policy maker, and definition of problems, 83-84; and problem selection, 203;
of Puritanism, 189, 228-53; of research
worker, 84; role of reference groups in,
4; of science (see Ethos of science); of
scientist, 249n; and social institutions,
224; and social position, 118-19; and
war, 109
605