The Gray Area for Incorruptible Scientific Research

Abstract

In this paper I try to contribute to the discussion about incorruptible professional behavior in scientific research. For this purpose I take Merton’s famous norms as a point of departure, not in order to note that scientists do not always conform to them, but to conceive them as ‘default-norms’ by raising the question which deviations may be defensible and which ones are not. The emphasis will be on the norm of disinterestedness. I conclude with a brief discussion of the possibility and usefulness of subsuming all this in a general professional code for scientific researchers.

A Dutch version of this paper appeared already in 1999 (Kuipers 1999). Next it was first translated, revised and extended as my contribution to a planned Liber Amicorum for Annie Kuipers, to be published on the occasion of her retirement. Very dreadfully, she died of cancer in 2003 soon after the plan was set up and the volume never appeared. Annie Kuipers (unfortunately, no family) was for about 25 years the leading person in the field of philosophy at the publishing house Reidel, later Kluwer Academic Publishers (and now part of Springer). It is difficult to overestimate the role she played in the recruitment of authors and the running of book series and journals and setting up new ones. For example, in cooperation with Jaakko Hintikka and Robert Cohen she ‘managed’ for years the Synthese Library book series and the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, respectively. She played a great role in the well functioning of the journals Erkenntnis and Synthese. Several other books, book series and journals in the area of philosophy, logic and linguistics profited enormously from her efforts. Despite her attempts to the contrary, the prices of such publications became at most, if at all, payable for libraries. This will also apply to the present Springer volume. However this may be, it is worth noting at the start of the European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA) that Annie Kuipers was a main figure in paving the way for the interaction between philosophers of science of Europe and America, and stimulated in this way the re-vitalization of philosophy of science in Europe where it had made a flourishing start in the Interbellum.

A revised version of the draft for the Liber Amicorum turned out to be very useful as the last chapter (13) of my Structures in Science (2001), in which it is entitled “‘Default-Norms’ in Research Ethics”. That version is here included with the originally intended title, some marginal revisions, and updating notes. I like to thank David Atkinson, Martin van Hees, Erik Krabbe, Anne Ruth Mackor and Jeanne Peijnenburg for their comments on the draft of the chapter. Finally I like to thank the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS, Wassenaar) where I could update it for the present volume.