To be Scientific is to be Communist

“We consider a deflationary view in which science refers to whatever is regarded as epistemically successful, but find that this does not leave room for the important notion of scientific error and fails to capture distinctive social elements of science”

“This leads us to the view that a demarcation criterion should be a widely upheld social norm without immediate epistemic connotations. Our tentative answer is the communist norm, which calls on scientists to share their work widely for public scrutiny and evaluation”

“An academic researcher who sets a threshold for statistical significance on the basis of a careful balancing of the epistemic and social risks that could result from erroneously rejecting or failing to reject her null hypothesis seems to be doing something right, whereas a commercial researcher who sets a similar threshold based on whether rejecting or failing to reject the hypothesis would serve her company’s interests better is doing something wrong”

“we think something problematic is going on when research is driven by commercial interests”

“commercial researchers have been known to actively work to prevent publicly funded research being made available to all”

“academic researchers have strong incentives to share their results widely even in very competitive environments. Commercial researchers may see themselves as involved in a zero-sum game with competitors, whereas academic researchers are always collaborating (on the sum total of human knowledge) at the same time as they may be competing (to contribute particular bits to that sum)”

“we do not intend to suggest that the incentives for academic researchers are beyond reproach”

“The pressure to publish and establish a name for oneself can make p-hacking, data dredging, and other questionable research practices attractive to academic researchers as well”

“In distinguishing commercial and academic research we instead make the following two more narrow claims”

“First, the incentive to share results widely is an essential cornerstone of academic research”

“whereas the incentive to share is at best incidental to commercial research”

“Second, as we will now emphasize with examples, the goals, context, and norms of commercial research lead to behavior that is plainly misleading and counterproductive when viewed from the perspective of the lofty epistemic goals of science”

“While some of these behaviors occur in academic research as well, the evidence we will now review suggests that they are much more frequent and more serious in their consequences in the commercial context”

“As long as it remains in their interest to do so, companies will continue to mislead, creating an epistemic arms race”

“Just as Popper used his answer to the demarcation problem to criticize Freudian psychoanalysis and astrological theories as pseudo-scientific, we may give an answer to the problem that lets us criticize commercial research as pseudo-scientific”

“the project of finding a clear methodological demarcation criterion has not seemed to bear much fruit”

“for the most part philosophers of science have abandoned the project, believing it will not be fruitful”

“there is a sense that to be scientific is to be especially good or trustworthy that seems to drive many everyday uses of ‘scientific’ as an adjective. It seems to indicate meeting some standard that the speaker believes ought to have been met”

“First, science is too varied and many-faceted to be exhaustively characterized by any peculiar or distinctive methodological or epistemic achievement. Thus, an answer to the demarcation problem cannot only rely on the specifics of methodology. Second, we do often use ‘scientific’ or describing something as a ‘science’ as a means of indicating some sort of normative success. The question remains how one can square these without the errors just identified”

“Being scientific or being part of science means something like successfully participating in the socio-cultural activity of scientific inquiry”

“at root there is an ostensive element to this”

“we must point to a set of paradigm institutionalized activities and say ‘those are the scientific ones’”

“A good starting point in thinking about scientific social norms is the set of Mertonian CUDOS norms: communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism (Merton 1942)”

“According to a survey by Anderson et al. (2010), when asked about their normative force (i.e. whether scientists should conform to them), each of the CUDOS norms is supported by over 75% of scientists. Norms expressing opposing principles (‘counternorms’) receive no more than about 25% support (Anderson et al. 2010, figure 1)”

“expressed support for the communist norm in particular ranges up to 95% (Louis, Jones, and Campbell 2002; Macfarlane and Cheng 2008)”

“A second reason for taking the CUDOS norms as a starting point is that they are relatively field-independent”

“What is the content of these norms?”

“Communism says that one must make one’s work available to others for free, not try to maintain proprietary rights to it, and treat it as always properly open to the evaluation of the scientific community”

“Universalism enjoins one to evaluate ideas independently of one’s opinion of the person who put it forward”

“Disinterestedness requires one to evaluate ideas based on evidential or cognitive considerations, rather than based on one’s preferences or interests”

“Finally, according to organized skepticism, one must systematically test claims and remain open to the possibility of their future falsification. This includes never simply taking things on faith or as beyond the pale of dispute”

“out of these four social norms, the communist norm in particular is a good place to start in deciding whether or not a claim is scientific”

“science is a shared socio-cultural activity. Anyone who is not making their work available to the broader scientific community is not taking part in science as a shared cultural activity”

“The other three CUDOS norms do not in the same way help us identify the relevant community”

“Alchemists maintaining secret journals and refusing to share esoteric arcane knowledge are not typically felt to be part of a scientific community”

“Or consider cranks, who are all too keen on sharing their work, but make it clear by their indifference to critique and counterargument that they do not think the community has any right to evaluate their achievements”

“Our view correctly assesses alchemists and cranks as engaged in activities that in some ways resemble scientific research but fall short of full participation”

“Insofar as they conform to the communist norm, the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities all count as science”

“On this point we side with the broad German conception of the Wissenschaften over the more narrow English sciences. We exclude only those parts of the arts and humanities with a penchant for secrecy or esotericism”

“But the profit motive, considered as an overarching value pursued in commercial research, turns out to encourage secrecy and withholding of scientific information”

“scientific research is that which successfully manages to be communist”

“By this we mean that it makes itself available as far as possible to the perusal, scrutiny, and critique of the broader scientific community”

“Being scientific, which is to say participating in this community as a good communist, is a worthy activity”

“our argument gives support and impetus to the Open Science movement. By making science cheaply and widely available, by facilitating more openness about what is being done and why, and by making it possible for a greater variety of people to participate, Open Science initiatives embody the definitive feature of science as such. Open Science is a step towards the better realization of communism within scientific communities, which is just to say it represents science achieving its highest ideal”

“Merton, R. K. 1942. “A Note on Science and Democracy.” Journal of Legal and Political Sociology 1 (1–2): 115–126. [Google Scholar]”