When I use a word . . . Academic norms, a scientific ethic, and the scientific conscience

• Published in: BMJ (Online) 2024-11, Vol.387, p.q2419
• Main Author: Aronson, Jeffrey K
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 17th century; Cultural values; Essays; Intellectualism; Norms; Opinion; Philosophers; Puritanism; Religious beliefs; Science; Scientists; Skepticism; Social order; Universalism
• ISSN: 1756-1833; 1756-1833
• DOI: 10.1136/bmj.q2419

To understand how academic science can be violated we must first understand the norms that determine how it should be successfully prosecuted. The work of the sociologist Robert K Merton is informative. In the 1930s and 1940s he described, in three related essays, the ways in which academic norms had developed and what they were. In the first essay, he described what he supposed had been the influence of Puritanism in the 17th century, while acknowledging that the Protestant religious ethic was only one factor in the development of rational and empirical science. In the second essay he focused on factors that might induce hostility against science, leading to the enunciation of some academic norms: scientific autonomy (preventing contradictory influences from other spheres), integrity (the appreciation of which enhances the likelihood that scientific results will receive public acceptance in the absence of complete understanding of how they were achieved), the use of comprehensible language in describing outcomes and their interpretation, and the restriction of academic skepticism to scientific thought. In the third essay he outlined other norms, based on the cultural values and mores that govern scientific activities: universalism, communality (which he called communism), disinterestedness, and organised skepticism; to these we can add appropriate curiosity and restraint of excess enthusiasm. In addition to these, there are norms relating to the methods that are used to obtain evidence and to the methods used to analyse the knowledge thus obtained. Together these constitute a scientific ethic and imply a scientific conscience.