Chapter 1 FROM ORDER TO DISORDER 5 mins. John enters and goes into his office. He says something very quickly about having made a bad mistake. He had sent the review of a paper. . . . The rest of the sentence is inaudible. 5 mins.

This ground-breaking text offers a fresh perspective on the governance of science from the standpoint of social and political theory. Science has often been seen as the only institution that embodies the elusive democratic ideal of the 'open society'. Yet, science remains an elite activity that commands much more public trust than understanding, even though science has become increasingly entangled with larger political and economic issues.

Scientists and 'anti-scientists' alike need a more realistic image of science. The traditional mode of research, academic science, is not just a 'method': it is a distinctive culture, whose members win esteem and employment by making public their findings. Fierce competition for credibility is strictly regulated by established practices such as peer review. Highly specialized international communities of independent experts form spontaneously and generate the type of knowledge we call 'scientific' - systematic, theoretical, empirically-tested, quantitative, and so on. Ziman shows (...) that these familiar 'philosophical' features of scientific knowledge are inseparable from the ordinary cognitive capabilities and peculiar social relationships of its producers. This wide-angled close-up of the natural and human sciences recognizes their unique value, whilst revealing the limits of their rationality, reliability, and universal applicability. It also shows how, for better or worse, the new 'post-academic' research culture of teamwork, accountability, etc. is changing these supposedly eternal philosophical characteristics. (shrink)

The relationship between economics and the philosophy of natural science has changed substantially during the last few years. What was once exclusively a one-way relationship from philosophy to economics now seems to be much closer to bilateral exchange. The purpose of this paper is to examine this new relationship. First, I document the change. Second, I examine the situation within contemporary philosophy of science in order to explain why economics might have its current appeal. Third, I consider some of the (...) issues that might jeopardize the success of this philosophical project. (shrink)

Why is science so credible? Usual answers center on scientists' objective methods or their powerful instruments. In his new book, Thomas Gieryn argues that a better explanation for the cultural authority of science lies downstream, when scientific claims leave laboratories and enter courtrooms, boardrooms, and living rooms. On such occasions, we use "maps" to decide who to believe—cultural maps demarcating "science" from pseudoscience, ideology, faith, or nonsense. Gieryn looks at episodes of boundary-work: Was phrenology good science? How about cold fusion? (...) Is social science really scientific? Is organic farming? After centuries of disputes like these, Gieryn finds no stable criteria that absolutely distinguish science from non-science. Science remains a pliable cultural space, flexibly reshaped to claim credibility for some beliefs while denying it to others. In a timely epilogue, Gieryn finds this same controversy at the heart of the raging "science wars.". (shrink)

The 'Evolution of Cooperation' addresses a simple yet age-old question; If living things evolve through competition, how can cooperation ever emerge? Despite the abundant evidence of cooperation all around us, there existed no purely naturalistic answer to this question until 1979, when Robert Axelrod famously ran a computer tournament featuring a standard game-theory exercise called The Prisoner's Dilemma. To everyone's surprise, the program that won the tournament, named Tit for Tat, was not only the simplest but the most "cooperative" entrant. (...) This unexpected victory proved that cooperation - one might even say altruism - is mathematically possible and therefore needs no hidden hand or divine agent to create and sustain it. A great roadblock to the understanding of all sorts of behavior was at last removed. The updated edition includes an extensive new chapter on cooperation in cancer cells and among terrorist organizations. (shrink)

This trenchant study analyzes the rise and decline in the quality and format of science in America since World War II. Science-Mart attributes this decline to a powerful neoliberal ideology in the 1980s which saw the fruits of scientific investigation as commodities that could be monetized, rather than as a public good.

Increasing the “truth per dollar” of money spent on science is one legitimate long-run goal of the economics of science. But before this goal can be achieved, we need to increase our knowledge of the successes and failures of past and current reward structures of science. This essay reviews what economists have learned about the behavior of scientists and the reward structure of science. One important use of such knowledge will be to help policy-makers create a reward structure that is (...) more efficient in the future. (shrink)

The pace of scientific progress may be hindered by the tendency of our academic institutions to reward being popular rather than being right. A market-based alternative, where scientists can more formally 'stake their reputation', is presented here. It offers clear incentives to be careful and honest while contributing to a visible, self-consistent consensus on controversial scientific questions. In addition, it allows patrons to choose questions to be researched without choosing people or methods. The bulk of this paper is spent in (...) examining potential problems with the proposed approach. After this examination, the idea still seems to be plausible and worthy of further study. (shrink)