Abstract
Normal science involves persistent collective application of an agreed research agenda. Anomaly can threaten normal science, but so too can “undue persistence” in that agenda by a normal science peer group. We consider how “undue persistence” might be a collective effect of the common incentive structure that individual members of the peer group typically face in relation to their careers. To understand how “undue persistence” might be ameliorated, we consider the affordances of a peer’s membership of a departmental collegium, organized on a different basis than the specialist peer group and hence able to supply the individual scholar with kinds of information and critical comment that may occasion off-agenda contributions to the specialty. The idea of brokerage is borrowed from the sociology of innovation to see how a scholar’s departmental colleagues might be able to broker new ways of thinking that can assist in the avoidance of “undue persistence”.
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Notes
Compare Steve Fuller, who said (1988, p. 3), programmatically, that
The fundamental question of the field of study I call social epistemology is: How should the pursuit of knowledge be organized, given that under normal circumstances knowledge is pursued by many human beings, each working on a more or less well-defined body of knowledge and each equipped with roughly the same imperfect cognitive capacities, albeit with varying degrees of access to one another’s activities.
See the Google Scholar citations for Chubin and Connolly (1982) at https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?cluster=2221477401454438821&hl=en&lr=&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5.
I believe my account is complementary, rather than an alternative, to any internalist account because, of course, anomalies, should they be independently definable, still have to be noticed and acted on. The “dynamics of research” which I try to identify can facilitate or at least disinhibit noticing and acting. My account also provides for off-agenda scholarly activity even in the absence of acknowledged anomalies, and this is a strength, in my view, because or insofar as some “novel” developments in the disciplinary specialties are indeed the result of the recombination of previously isolated ideas, rather than a response to “crisis”.
As Daniel Alpert has pointed out (1985, pp. 250–251), any given department itself exists, relationally, in a dual institutionalization, with its “sister” departments in the same university, with which it may be bound in degree programs, funding arrangements, infrastructure support, and the like, and with its cognate departments at other universities, with which it may compete and cooperate in various ways.
Indeed, on some accounts (see, especially, Jacobs 2013, pp. 27–28), this arrangement (of curriculum mapped onto collegium) is crucial for the viability of a discipline for at least two reasons. First of all, and locally, providing an attractive major for undergraduate students is the budgetary foundation of a department’s very existence in most university systems. Secondly, and globally, a discipline will be able reproduce itself only if it can train students according to a curriculum that will enable them, after further postgraduate study and research, to present themselves as fit to teach (elements of) that curriculum elsewhere. In any event, the work of the collegium as such will include (Hyland 2012, p. 24) “[e]veryday local practices of teaching, supervision, research, marking and committee work”.
“Dynamics of research” associated with “scientific growth” in the so-called “rural” disciplines will of course reflect relevant differences. Where there is, as Becher puts it (1989, p. 157), a high problem to person ratio, or, as Whitley would say (1984, p. 88), a relatively low level of strategic or even functional dependence of one scholar on the work of others, there will, arguably, be less risk of collective persistence in “played-out” research approaches. The risk, in these situations, is, rather, that knowledge will grow, insofar as it does, by an accumulation of unorganized materials rather than through systematization, leading to profounder insight. Accordingly, the role of dual institutionalization in “tuning” the “dynamics of research” will be different.
This, if you will, is one approach to the “fine structure” of Kuhn’s “normal science”, which he describes (1970, p. 24) as follows: “Closely examined, whether historically or in the contemporary laboratory, that enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena … Instead, normal-scientific research is directed to the articulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies.”
While there are significant differences between “rural” and “urban” disciplinary research specializations, there are some analogies which render some of the points to be considered applicable to some instances, anyway, of research activity in “rural” specialties. Consider, for example, what might be called “the Foucault phenomenon”, where, across a range of humanities and social science disciplines, literary, historical and sociological studies were, from the mid-seventies, increasingly preoccupied with broadly Foucauldian approaches, which became, if you will, more or less canonical, at least in certain circles. (Foucault’s work had, at mid July 2019, nearly 930,000 Google Scholar citations; his h-index was 288.) While there was no agreement, even in this situation, about researchable topics, and hence no “unproductive overconcentration” on a narrow list of such topics, there was widespread agreement on the approach to be taken to researchable topics and this may well have constituted an instance of “unproductive overconcentration”, especially in light of the tenuous grasp, by many participants in this phenomenon, of the actual techniques associated with Foucault’s own work.
This particular analysis shows most clearly, I think, how the widely-discussed distinction between contexts of discovery and of justification does not, in any event, cleanly map onto a distinction between empirical (e.g. historical or sociological) analysis, on the one hand, and logical analysis, on the other hand. Referees, readers more generally, are making decisions about how well justified an argument or thesis is, and we can understand what they are doing, e.g. in applying epistemologically respectable standards of assessment, in a way that is empirically informed. For acute commentary on the discovery/justification dualism, see Paul Hoyningen-Huene (1987).
Another threat to growth of knowledge sits at a right angle to the unproductive overconcentration that Chubin and Connolly have drawn attention to. This arises even, or perhaps even especially, when individual scholars are running minor variations on approved themes using approved tools, for even this activity requires a degree of “novelty” at least in the sense that the results reported are not already part of the agreed corpus of disciplinary or specialist knowledge. So, in particular, in pursuit of such novelty, within the constraints of conservative normal science, it appears—and the relevant studies are now numerous—that many scholars report results that cannot be replicated or reproduced by others. This is the so-called reproducibility crisis—worthy of examination in its own right. (See, for a good summary and references, The National Academies of Sciences 2019.).
Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit provide an important analysis (2004, p. 121): “It seems plausible that a system in which enquiry proceeds across a broad front may be superior to one in which all energy is directed at being the first to do what everyone else is trying to do. From the point of view of the system as a whole, it may be better to have scholars choose research agendas that are more speculative, and where the chance of each making a fool of herself (or simply wasting time, coming up empty-handed) are non-negligible. … In other words, the system as a whole can pool risks that individual scholars may well find daunting. On this basis, there is a problem: individual scholars may choose research agendas that are on average too conservative.”
It is important, as a proviso, to understand that I am describing, in what follows, some of the affordances of the departmental seminar—some of the opportunities that, potentially, it makes available to the scholar. Whether those opportunities are exploited, however, depends on two other factors: (1) whether the collegium participates effectively, and (2) whether the scholar who is presenting has the will to take advantage of what the collegium offers. These are non-trivial assumptions.
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to anonymous referees for a rigorous and helpful process of peer review. Thanks too to Professor Peter Høj, UQ Vice-Chancellor, for a period of leave during which the final versions of this paper were prepared. Thanks to Professor Peter Harrison for extending to me the hospitality of the UQ Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Thanks, finally, to Jerry Gaus, friend of the decades, whose own work has inspired my attempts to “naturalize” the accounts we offer of social knowledge-making. This work extends that, on the disciplines, already reported in D’Agostino (2012, 2016, 2019).
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D’Agostino, F. Growth of knowledge: dual institutionalization of disciplines and brokerage. Synthese 198, 4167–4190 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02335-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02335-1