An Economic Model of Scientific Rules

Abstract

Empirical reports on scientific competition show that scientists can be depicted as self-interested, strategically behaving agents. Nevertheless, we argue that recognition-seeking scientists will have an interest in establishing methodological norms which tend to select theories of a high epistemic value, and that these norms will be still more stringent if the epistemic value of theories appears in the utility function of scientists, either directly or instrumentally.

A Contractarian Solution to the Experimenter’s Regress

“…Further replications might show that an experimental result was erroneous, but this will happen precisely because debiasing procedures such as randomization prevent any systematic intervention to alter the result according to anyone's particular interests. This intuition can be substantiated from the standpoint of the epistemic contractualism promoted by Jesus Zamora (2002Zamora ( , 2006Ferreira & Zamora 2006).…”

Science: the rules of the game

“…Unfortunately, illuminating as it is, and in spite of Popper s enormous influence in other respects, this metaphor of science as a game and scientific method as a set of conventions had only but an extremely marginal repercussion. 2 To remedy in part this situation, in a series of papers (Zamora-Bonilla 1999, 2002a, 2006a-b, 2007, Ferreira and Zamora-Bonilla 2006 I have been arguing for the applicability of game-theory reasoning to understand some essential aspects of the construction and evolution of scientific knowledge, aspects that have been strongly disputed within that slippery and misty field between philosophy of science and science studies. 3 The basic idea of those papers was to describe the scientific situations from the point of view of scientists themselves, of their epistemic and non-epistemic interests, and to assume that the final state to which their decisions lead must have the property of being a Nash equilibrium, i.e., a combination of decisions so that the choice made by each individual is optimal given the choices of the others (the rationale behind this idea is that, if a situation is not a Nash equilibrium, then at least one agent will realise she can get a better outcome by changing her choice, hence changing the collective state).…”

“…The game theoretic solution to this problem is to institute some rules that make the discovery of fraud more likely and the associated penalty discouraging enough, but the community can tolerate a certain frequency of misbehaviour, if the expected gain in epistemic and professional terms is high enough (cf. Zamora Bonilla (2006), 346-49).…”

The ‘science-as-market’ analogy: a constitutional economics perspective

“…Ferreira (Ferreira and Zamora Bonilla 2006) explicitly advocate a contractarian approach to methodology. 31 The authors share with invisible-hand accounts of science the assumption "that scientists can be depicted as self-interested, strategically behaving agents" (Ferreira and Zamora Bonilla 2006: 191), they emphasize however that, by contrast to approaches "that describe scientific order as the emergent outcome of some market-like mechanism" (ibid.…”