Toward a philosophy of commercialized science

Abstract

In the wake of the French Revolution, the Paris Academie des sciences, like most institutions associated with the old regime, suddenly faced the possibility of restructuring or elimination. The Academie’s then treasurer Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier argued against any such change by upholding a familiar ideal of scientific inquiry that sees science as characteristically divorced from commercial interests and financial motivation. Ideally speaking, the financial disinterestedness of scientists ensures that the useful knowledge they produce will be shared readily and widely to increase the discoverer’s reputation; if scientists (les savants) were driven by financial motives, they might instead chose to keep new discoveries secret until they could be used for personal financial gain, in which case society at large would lose out by not being made privy to various useful discoveries. Lavoisier effectively claimed that this ideal is best instantiated by the Academie’s existing institutional structure, so changing that structure to allow commercial interests to mix with scientific research (as had been tentatively proposed) would surely be a mistake. This ideal has been a popular one since the birth of modern science. By the twentieth century it was so well entrenched in the culture and practice of scientific inquiry that the sociologist of science Robert Merton actually used it to define what a well-functioning scientific community looks like; scientific communities, according to Merton, are characteristically governed by four ‘‘norms’’ or ‘‘institutional imperatives,’’ two of which are the communal sharing of scientific results and a financially disinterested attitude. On Merton’s account, unless a community strives to adhere to such norms, it cannot properly be considered scientific. When looking at the character of avowedly ‘‘scientific’’ research since about the 1980s, however, such norms seem to govern less than ever before. The results of