A Tribe of Scientists

Abstract

Lewis examines the concept of credibility in scientific processes using examples of practising science during her PhD research. The scientific method provides scientists with a formalised approach to the generation of credible scientific knowledge. However, by drawing on personal experiences of scientific research, Lewis reveals a chasm between the subjective practice of science—so-called messy methods—and the sanitised version of methods in published works. Lewis explores contemporary social theory to described science as a nuanced, complex and messy process. Lewis proposes that such so-called mess, must be contained in published scientific works, including through the reporting of null results and the explicit description of scientific methods employed.

Glossary

Constructionist

 The concept that humans generate knowledge and meaning from an interaction between their experiences and their ideas.

Credibility

 The extent to which science is recognised as a reliable and trustworthy source of information, particularly in terms of how the research adheres to traditional scientific principles, such as the scientific method.

Glacial periods

 An interval of time characterised by substantially lower global temperatures and glacial advances. These cold periods (i.e. the ice ages) were interrupted by shorter periods that were substantially warmer, called the interglacials.

Heinrich events

 A natural phenomenon occurring during the ice ages when large icebergs break from Northern Hemisphere glaciers and traverse the North Atlantic. The melt water from icebergs acts to disrupt oceanic and atmospheric circulation and causes large-scale climatic change.

Methods

 From Law (2004a), methods is not simply a technique for producing research output, ‘it is not just a philosophy of method, a methodology. It is not even simply about the kinds of realities that we want to recognise or the kinds of world we might hope to make. It is also, and most fundamentally, about a way of being’ (p. 10).

Messy

 This is an imprecise description that encompasses the vague, diffuse, ephemeral and elusive nature of reality and undertaking research.

Null result

 A scientific result that does not support a hypothesis.

Othering

 The process by which researchers exclude information that does not fit into an approach as irrelevant.

Palaeoclimatology/palaeoclimatologists

 The study of past climate change and variability/those studying past climate change and variability.

Sanitised

 This is the process through which research analysis and methods are transformed from a messy, real-world activity and presented as a streamlined procedure.

Scientific method

 An approach of systematic and repeated observation, measurement, experiment and the formulation, testing and modification of scientific hypotheses.

Tribe

 Latour and Woolgar (1979) description of scientists as bound together by a set of practices. This is summarised by Law (2004a) as ‘Scientists have a culture. They have beliefs. They have practices. They work, they gossip, and they worry about the future. And, somehow or other, out of their work, their practices and their beliefs, they produce knowledge, scientific knowledge, accounts of reality’ (p. 19).