In 1942, sociologist Robert Merton explained the ethos of science in terms of its 4 crucial worths: The first, universalism, suggested the guidelines for researching are unbiased and apply to all researchers, regardless of their status. The second, communality, described the concept that findings need to be shared and shared. The third, disinterestedness, explained a system in which science is done for the sake of knowledge, not individual gain. And the final worth, arranged hesitation, implied that claims ought to be inspected and confirmed, not trusted. For researchers, composed Merton, these were “moral as well as technical prescriptions.”
In his brand-new book, Science Fictions: How Scams, Bias, Carelessness, and Hype Weaken the Look For Reality, Stuart Ritchie backs the above as a design for how science is meant to work. “By following the 4 Mertonian Standards, we ought to end up with a clinical literature that we can trust,” he writes. He then proceeds to invest the remainder of the book discussing all the ways in which contemporary science fails to do just this.
Sci-fi by Stuart Ritchie
Ritchie is a psychologist at King’s College London and the author of a previous book, Intelligence: All that Matters, about IQ screening. In Science Fictions he provides a broad summary of the issues dealing with science in the 21 st century. One of the revelations to come from psychology’s reckoning with its replication problem is that basic statistical techniques for preventing bias are in reality subject to control, whether in
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