The Very Idea of a Scientific Ethos. The Mertonian Beginnings

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Pages: 7-16
DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.54664/QDQR6005

Abstract:

My aim in this paper is to provide a detailed historical reconstruction regarding the genesis of the concept of scientific ethos in the works of Robert K. Merton from Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (1938) to Science and Technology in a Democratic Order (1942). He described science as a social institution that needed its own social legitimacy in order to gain its autonomy. But science remained in close relation with society and it functions socially as a community of inquiry and as an institution. Therefore, in addition to characterizing science on the basis of methodological rules of empirical validation and criteria of logical consistency, we must also consider its normative structure, its own ethos as a system of values, attitudes, and feelings. Merton made this theoretical discovery in less than a decade, and the reconstruction of this theoretical journey is itself illuminating for clarifying the concept of the scientific ethos.

Keywords:

Robert K. Merton, science, social order, ethos of science, autonomy of science.

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