This ,,article’’ is a byproduct of a failed presentation I prepared last year. Since I’m still quite content with my notes, after a brief polishing I decided to publish them here – perhaps someone would find them entertaining. Initially I planned to omit the final remarks, being a personal opinion not much relevant to the topic, however I noticed I’m definitely not alone in the pessimism, so I left it intact as an expression of my ,,support’’ to all the pessimists out there.
The kind reader is apologised in advance for my awkward English.
In the popular culture, since its birth around 80 years ago, much is being said about science, and probably for a good reason: extending expected lifetime almost twice, providing communication technologies, fertilizers, fast means of transport and synthetic insulin on one hand, destroying our natural habitat with pesticides, synthetic hormones, antibiotics, acids, and even noticeable amount of radionucleotides on the other. I used to find it really funny how the mass culture pictured scientists: women and men in the white coats, each year proving beyond all doubt that the margarine is healthier than butter, or the other way around. In recent years however it no longer seems funny. The imaginary, caricatural science is used as an argument by politicians and news reporters, strange movement leaders and other media weirdos, and I'm having some good old-fashioned bad feelings about where this leads us to. Therefore I’m going to present a few things I’ve heard and read on the topic of science so that you, dear reader, can review or develop some personal opinions on that matter. Besides of course, the topic is interesting in itself!
I'm just going to chaotically present some taste of how the views on science developed in the 20th century. I’m not exactly a scientist, not at all a philosopher, and above all not a historian – an ideal person to write about the history of philosophy of science! The facts mentioned are not necessarily historically accurate, and the views presented are not necessarily the views of the companies I work for, neither mine. To make things clear: you can't sue me for anything.
I thought that science started a century ago with the Vienna Circle and the development of mathematical logic. However Alan Chalmers in his fantastic book ,,What is this thing called science'' [1] suggests it started 300years ago – fair enough as Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and his peers introduced quite sophisticated mathematical models of motion etc. Then Wojciech Sady, another great historian of science, proposed a number of times it started around 4th century BC (with Hippocratic Corpus), but then he adds it disappeared for a long time to re-emerged around the times of Newton. So it seems that 18th century is a nice place to start.
Since we're not that much concerned with the history beyond some examples, we will only note two figures: Lord Bacon (1561-1626), a lawyer who fantasized about institutionalization of science in order to make it ,,even more effective'', and August Comte (1798-1857), who two centuries later ,,invented positivism'' as well as sociology. The former, according to current tradition, is held accountable for coining the term ,,empiricism'' and glorifying the inductive method of deriving facts about the world. Quoting wiki [2]: "Bacon favored the steady and incremental collection of empirical evidence using a method that derives general principles from the senses and particulars, gradually leading to the most general principles".
Comte held similar views, adding naturalism to the list of ,,desirable properties of science''. Naturalism has many flavours but its chief epistemological form demands scientific explanations to stick to observable, physical events. He held and popularised the view that the one and only subject of science are facts and relations between them.
We probably should also mention Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Bacon's contemporary claimed to be ,,the father of scientific method'', however since as far as I can tell he didn't make claims about science itself (beyond trolling people, including the pope), we skip him in silence and move straight to 20th century.
The ideas of Bacon, Comte and alikes had cumulated in the views of the Vienna Circle, a group of scientists with a soft spot for analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy is not the topic of this article, but roughly it's an approach which originated in the ideas of the first (serious) logicians: Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russel and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as G. E. Moore of whom I know nothing about (as he was not a logician, apparently). The chief characteristics of analytic philosophy are (a) the obsession about language and the relations between language users and the world, and (b) focus on rigorous arguments and the obnoxious use of formal logic.
Once more, the unreliable but handy wiki on Vienna Circle [3]: ,,Main topics were foundational debates in the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics; the modernization of empiricism by modern logic; the search for an empiricist criterion of meaning; the critique of metaphysics and the unification of the sciences in the unity of science''. Not much of that worked out, nothing to be exact -- but first things first!
The Vienna Circle tried to attack the so-called ,,demarcation problem'' i.e. what is and what isn't science. The attack was conducted in the analytic tradition: focusing on sentences, the carriers of scientific knowledge. It seems that some sentences are scientific and some are not, e.g. "under 100 Pa the boiling point of water is 100C" is, unlike "I like your shirt" or "god is love".
They proposed an empirical criterion: a sentence is scientific if it is empirically verifiable. Ostensibly it seems to work as we can take samples of HO2 and measure its boiling point under given pressure, while we can't take love and god to observe they have exactly the same properties to conclude they are the same object. Liking is also not much observable or testable, though modern neurologists might have a different view on that -- the verifiability criteria seem to change (often extend) in time, though that's not as easy as it seems for reasons which will become clear a few paragraphs further. Anyway, the view that verifiability grants scientificity was dubbed Logical Empiricism.
Following Wittgenstein, some of the logical empiricists assumed that only scientific sentences are meaningful. It can’t be overlooked that according to their own criteria, the very sentence "only empirically verifiable sentences are meaningful" doesn't seem to be empirically verifiable, so it must be meaningless. Such fun! But even without insisting on such a meager theory of meaning, logical empiricism seems to face problems. The most interesting sentences of science don't involve observable objects but rather things/names like mass, velocity or electrons and photons. These ,,things'' are not subject of direct experience, therefore sentences about them can't be directly verified. For example the electron might seem observable as we can witness its condensation trail in the cloud chamber; the trial proves the electron passed through the chamber much the same as a condensation trial in the sky proves an airplane flew by. But this ,,much the same’’ is a bit overstretched, because we can at least sometimes observe the airplanes leaving condensation trails, while we can't observe electrons, ever. ,,They're just too tiny'' (actually that's even weirder but a bit off-topic for now). And that's the tiniest of similar problems, e.g. how could one ,,observe’’ frames of reference, the basic notion (subject) of the General Relativity?
Logical positivists tried to attack the problems of reducing theoretical sentences to observable ones but eventually failed. Their program ran out of fuel and died somewhere between 1950 and 1960.
Besides the problems of verification, logical positivism didn't manage to explain how the universal statements of science get derived from finite observations. As John Stuart Mill said some 50 years before the Vienna Circle ,,no law of science can be considered mere inductive generalization of facts because each law does not exist in isolation'' [1].
One can't separate observations (or rather, as we're in analytic territory: observable statements) from the underlying theory. Also, science does not start with observations, so it's not just ,,go to the wild, make notes, generalize the observations to derive Science''. Observable statements are couched in some language. The richer the language, the more precise and interesting the observables get, e.g. compare ,,look, that bright spot appears every night for over a month now!'' to ,,the celestial body was observed to raise 45 min after sunset at 87 degrees left to the south a week ago and it does 60 min after sunset at 85 degrees now''. But the language of time and celestial geometry needs to be developed prior to this observation! And it requires some pretty serious volume of pre-observational knowledge to be able to observe virtually anything relevant to the 18th century physics. So in order for the 18th century physics to be ,,scientific'' according to Logical Positivists, one would have to empirically verify this prior knowledge too. But for these verifications one needs even more observations, which also need to be couched in some pre-observational knowledge... So in the end one is going downwards with verifying the bases of previous verifications, up to the point where one gets paranoid about the existence of anything else than themselves (like Decartes). And I'm not stipulating such an idea is not useful in itself (I very much sympathize with any anti-realistic positions), but the point is somehow science managed to avoid this infinite regress and instead moved forward, tossing and playing with very much unverified statements to develop the beautiful Newtonian theory of motion... Healthy or not, the logical positivism clearly does not capture the phenomenon of science.
As Willard Orman Van Quine pointed out in his 1957 ,,Scope and language of science'' [4]:
,,Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it. The quest for knowledge is properly an effort simply to broaden and deepen the knowledge which the man in the street already enjoys, in moderation, in relation to the commonplace things around him.'' and a bit further: ,,To disavow the very core of common sense (...) is a pompous confusion, a failure to observe a nice distinction between the baby and the bath water.''
Interestingly, young Quine used to visit the Vienna Circle and seemed to share its ideals. Only later he posed one more nail to the coffin of Logical Positivism.
The verification of universal statements itself (and a good science should constitute a fair amount of universal statements) is also causing problems: how many observations need to be made in order to gain certainty? During my lifetime a good few billion people died. Due to courtesy of news agencies, many of these deaths are reported directly to my attention, which constitutes a pretty impressive volume of (often well verified) observational material. I noticed that neither of these people who died was me. Therefore, given the bulk of empirical material, I feel bound to conclude (with great pleasure) that I am immortal!
Now comes Karl Popper -- a bit younger, similarly to Quine (only more frequently) hanging around with the Vienna Circle. He observed that astrology, psychoanalysis and Marxism are perfectly verifiable, yet he really didn't want to count them as science. For example Adler's psychoanalysis was centered around the claim that dreams are manifestations of hidden fears and desires. This claim is self-verifying: there's no way one could have a dream that would NOT be possible to interpret as one’s hidden desire -- even if one opposes the stuff dreamt of last night has nothing to do with one’s desires, that's exactly the point of being a hidden desire! Similarly Marx anticipated that the workers' revolution would first occur in the wealthiest nations: Germany or Britain. As soon as it occurred in the Russian Empire, his acolytes had to rewrite the theory so that the revolution (obviously) must first occur in the most oppressed nation (let’s pretend for a moment that the Bolshevik revolution was indeed a working class revolution, not a long-planned military coup). I assume horoscopes don't require further explanation.
Even worse, according to verifiability criterion, a horoscope is more scientific than say, Newtonian physics, because it gets more confirmations! Therefore, Popper concluded, empirical verifiability can't stand as a demarcation between science and non-science (or even worse: pseudo-science, i.e. a non-science pretending to be a science). Instead, he proposed that a sentence is scientific if it is falsifiable, i.e. it is possible, at least in principle, to empirically prove it false in case it was false. For example "all ravens are black" is a nice falsifiable claim, because there in principle exists an observation which would falsify it: namely an observation of any non-black raven.
Now you have to admit this was a really witty observation. Obviously we want science to extend our worldview, so it can't be mere confirmation of what we already observe, it should propose certain constrains; without them it'd be hard for science to make any meaningful predictions, and so far the so-called great success of science relies on its ability of making predictions far better than shamen and sorcerers in the past did. Quoting sir Richard Dawkins ,,cars ride, planes fly, computers compute (...) it works, bitches!''.
Nice, although this doesn't yet explain how does science progress. Popper proposed that the good working science should proceed roughly like this:
He was very precise about what it means for the new hypothesis to be stronger: a hypothesis B is stronger than hypothesis A if B is more falsifiable, i.e. there are more potential observations that would falsify B than there are for A.
For example: Copernicus' theory proposed circular orbits of the 6 planets. Since it didn't stick to the observations, he relied on an ad hoc apparatus of epicycles. These didn't work for too long since people (i.a. Galileo Galilei) invented telescopes. Keppler proposed a stronger theory that the orbits are actually elliptic. It is stronger as it's easier to notice deviation from a more complex shape and it'd be way harder to fix such deviations with some epicyclic mumbo-jumbo. Finally Newton proposed his theory of masses in motion, which not only fitted observations way better than Keplerian elliptic orbits -- it was much, much stronger as it applies also to orbits of moons, trajectories of falling bodies (cannonballs mostly), pendulums, pool table balls etc. So there were many more ways to falsify it.
Lakatos' example of an idealized Popperian scientific investigation (completely made up, but brilliant, most likely taken from [1]):
How come bats can fly so well in the dark while their eyes are so small and weak?
In Popperian philosophy of science falsification leads to progress when it shakes the existing knowledge: either by refuting a modest hypothesis, or by failing to falsify some strong, counterintuitive one (e.g. Maxwell's theory of magnetic fields and the radiowaves it implied). The job of science should be replacing the weaker hypotheses with stronger, ,,better ones'', which hold until they get falsified as well. No hypothesis is literally true, they are consecutive approximations which only converge to the ,,truth''.
Of course, there are problems with this approach, and the chief one is again the infinite regress: a hypothesis can get falsified relatively to some already known facts, which Popper called ,,background knowledge''. Therefore any falsification refutes either the hypothesis, or the background knowledge. But how can one know which one? There's a lovely (100% authentic) example of falsification going very wrong:
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) was a Danish astronomer famous for precision of his measurements. While he didn't have a telescope (invented by Galileo soon after Brahe's death), he happened to build large wooden structures in order to measure the positions of celestial bodies. N.b. his biography is hilarious.
Brahe was fascinated with Copernican model of the universe, but noticed a flaw: if the Earth rotates around the Sun, centre of the Universe, there should be noticeable parallax of the stars: between Spring and Autumn, the stars should be slightly shifted as relatively to the Sun they’re seen under different angle. Yet he didn't notice it in his super-precise measurements. He wrote that in order not to perceive the parallax, the stars would have to be ``further than 20 times the orbit of Saturn’’. But then, he wrote, in order to be visible at all, they would have to be almost as large as the Sun itself, which is absurd.
And it gets even worse...
The biggest discreditation of falsificationism is that not a single one of currently best scientific theories would ever be arrived at, as all of them would get falsified at their very beginning: e.g. Copernican model 1543 implied daily cycle of the Earth (its rotation around its own axis), but bodies falling from the tower land under its feet and not some 500m to the west of it, despite the rotating Earth should shift below them! Besides his model was not much in line with observable retrograde motion of planets (we already mentioned the ad hoc epicycles he introduced to compensate that). Finally, nobody observed phases of Venus when its relative facing against Earth and Sun changes (until Galileo who had a telescope). So the path leading through Keppler to Newton to Einstein would have never been followed, precisely because of such premature falsifications!
And then Thomas Kuhn enters the scene. He was a physicist who turned into historian (of science). By trying to generalise the history of scientific discoveries he developed a beautiful theory of how science works, presented in his 1962 book ,,Structure of scientific revolutions'' [5]. Utilising the analogy of social revolutions, he was probably the first person to seriously incorporate sociological and psychological factors into science. Even more than he initially wished for...
Science, Kuhn claims, is an activity of solving puzzles and riddles according to certain paradigm. Some critics point out the notion of paradigm is pretty obscure and used by Kuhn in over a dozen different meanings throughout the book – nevertheless the core idea seems rather easy to grasp: a paradigm consists of:
Scientists engage in what Kuhn calls ,,normal science'', i.e. solving puzzles within the paradigm: filling in the details like establishing constants, figuring out new measurement instruments, improving the techniques, gathering facts. Making predictions and being proud if they fit the later observations. In case of failure (falsification), the paradigm is not to blame; it's either fault of the equipment or some yet unknown aspect of the paradigm's ontology. Some problems therefore are just to be left as too hard, too uninteresting, or unfruitful.
With time the paradigm slows down scientific progress: scientists face a growing number of problems ,,too hard to solve’’. Initially they assume they lack ingenuity, but with time it becomes clear there's something wrong with the paradigm, so they shift it: move away to another, fresh one. The details of this process are described in his book which I'm currently reading so I can't tell you much about it; the general idea seems to be that during the crisis of one paradigm some alternatives get formed but don't get accepted because scientists were raised and trained within the old paradigm. Then they die out and the new generation of scientists (raised in the atmosphere of crisis of the old paradigm) gravitates towards the alternatives, slowly forming their ontology, standards etc. -- and this way the new paradigm forms. Then the usual work of normal science can be restored until the next crisis emerges.
It's worth mentioning that the paradigm shift is a progress on one hand: it allows to solve the previously unsolvable problems, but on the other it comes with certain losses. Just a short example: Cartesian physics had an explanation of why the planets orbit on roughly the same plane (with some weird/exotic theory of swirls), after shift to Newtonian laws of motion, there wasn’t any explanation for that. Such costs are referred to as Kuhn-losses.
Kuhn’s theory of scientific progress implies that in order to make two steps forward, one has sometimes to make one step back.
The most important thing about the theory of scientific revolutions is it attacked all of the warm and cosy superstitions concerning science. In particular it states that science doesn't chase any ultimate truths but rather concerns with challenges, puzzles and mastery within given paradigm, and the paradigm itself isn't ever ,,true’’ or ,,false’’, but rather fruitful or frustrating.
"As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice -- there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community... this issue of paradigm choice can never be unequivocally settled by logic and experiment alone." - Thomas S. Kuhn ,,The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' (1962) [5].
Popper insisted that science is (or rather ,,should be’’) the never-ending journey towards truths about the world via consecutive better/stronger theories. In particular it assumes constant progress. But Kuhn showed that is not historically accurate, that the consecutive theories seem to be merely clever ways of making sense of paradigms, and that paradigm shifts are far from monotonous progress.
Imre Lakatos was a friend of Kuhn and a student of Popper. In 1970 he wrote an article ,,History of Science and Its Rational Reconstruction'' [6] trying to bridge the two views somehow, and to ,,save the science'' by proposing notion of scientific research programs - a normative theory of science which does incorporate its historical nature.
Lakatos proposed a notion of scientific program, consisting of two parts:
Science then is conducted in Popperian way: new hypotheses are posed and get falsified. The only difference is that the hard core is never a subject of examination or revision -- only the hypotheses and explanations of the protective belt are. So for example, the core of Copernican program were the assumption that the Earth and other planets circulate around the Sun and the Earth rotates around its own axis; its protective belt consists of epicycles (an ad hoc hypothesis to fit the core with the observations), initial conditions (e.g. number of planets in the system), measurement methodology (naked eye, later a telescope), and certain toolset (trigonometry). Keppler replaced the epicycles with different shape of orbits, thus pushing the program forward.
Scientists work within given program for as long as it's fruitful. To ensure that, the program should govern or prescribe its future developments: e.g. Newtonian mechanics practically determined its future development for the next 200 years -- it was a program of physical explanation of the Universe in terms of motions and forces. On the contrary 20th century sociology didn't succeed much, despite being a completely legit science: it had its vocabulary, hypotheses were inductively confirmable and also falsifiable. However (at least according to Lakatos [6] and Chalmers [1]) it didn't propose any future investigations.
Lakatos’ theory of science helps to avoid problems of falsificationism (infinite regress), fits historical records just as Kuhn's model of revolutions, and in addition explains the existence of multiple, independent programs: Kuhn suggested that science is always governed by the current paradigm. If some scientists stick to the previous paradigm, it's because of psychological factors like stubbornness or habits... This view is of course a bit exaggerated: long time after general relativity got accepted as the current paradigm in physics, overthrowing the Newtonian paradigm, scientists kept developing classical physics -- e.g. the continuum mechanics which is actually large portion of what we consider science today (civil engineering, medicine, geology, hydrology etc). From the perspective of scientific programs, continuum mechanics is just the Newtonian program keeping operating despite having a rival of relativistic physics. It does so because of its tremendous fruitfulness (it produces inventions and guides technical endeavours, unlike the General Relativity which seems to apply mostly for very large-scale observations of astronomy).
We've gone through the history of desperate attempts at characterising Science. Positivists failed with various inductive accounts of truth-finding as (a) facts/observations are not independent of [the language of] the theory one works with, (b) they are fallible, and (c) there's so far no clear account of how can theories be derived from facts. Popperian falsificationism doesn't get us much further, largely since there's no account on what the falsification actually refutes. Kuhn and Lakatos, focusing on history of science, tried to at least explain it by proposing some generic framework in which scientists work: Kuhn divorced science from truth-seeking but fell shortly with explaining why and how a paradigm shift is a step forward; Lakatos avoided the former but failed to explain on how the incomparable programs (of often very different ,,hard cores'', in particular very different ontologies) could be pushing the science towards some ,,true picture of the world''. As Chalmers points out Lakatos wanted to build a realistic/rationalistic theory of science, where consecutive theories move towards more faithful image of the external world -- but eventually failed; Kuhn didn't want to propose an anti-realistic/relativistic theory, but he did anyway with his instrumentalistic puzzle-solving. It seems that the view on science as truth-seeking cannot stand...
The last person in this survey was a close friend of both Kuhn and Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend. Lakatos asked him to collaborate on a book ,,For and against method'', but soon after died. Saddened Feyerabend released his part of the book as ,,Against method'' [8] where he coins the term ,,scientific anarchism''. I didn't read the book, here are some quotes:
,,Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits and its disadvantages. In a democracy it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separate from the state''
,,Neither science nor rationality are universal measures of excellence. They are particular traditions, unaware of their historical grounds.''
,,The results obtained so far suggest abolishing the distinction between a context of discovery and a context of justification, norms and facts, observational terms and theoretical terms. NONE OF THESE DISTINCTIONS PLAYS A ROLE IN SCIENTIFIC PRACTICE. attempts to enforce them would have disastrous consequences. Popper's critical rationalism fails for the same reasons.''
According to Chalmers, Feyerabend points out that the difference between madman and a scientist is not the subject of her or his inquiry but rather how it's conducted: a madman works shallowly, denies existence of any problems for their hypotheses, neither does attempt at measuring their usefulness in case of existence of rival explanations. On the other hand a scientist would take into account state-of-art knowledge, even just to refute it. In other words: if someone is proposing or examining even the wildest hypotheses in physics, it's not necessary they know contemporary methodologies of science, but they'd better know contemporary physics.
Furthermore Feyerabend points out that since most theories are incomparable, couched in different languages, the choice of one over the other is purely subjective. For example classical Newtonian mechanics is couched in the language of mass, shape/volume and succession in time (one event comes after the other). These notions don't occur in general relativity; they're merely relations of object to given frame of reference, they change without the influence of any force, solely by picking different frame of reference. So for the scientist to pick either one is a matter of taste, preferences, aesthetic concerns, received education, exposure to propaganda and personal beliefs. There is nothing objective or rational in such a choice. He also joked that Kuhn's notion of science as collective solving of puzzles for personal gains and satisfaction makes organized crime a perfectly legit science.
In a number of books ([8],[9],[10]) Feyerabend stated that an individualistic society, free from propaganda and oppression, produces the most talented individuals. Individuality is freedom, and freedom is restricted with any particular methodology. Therefore he suggests abolishing institutionalization of science (Lord Bacon must be swirling in his grave), strict separation of science from the state, and on the topic of scientific method the only thing that could be said is ,,anything goes''.
Feyerabend's views were criticized by numerous author but apparently neither of them proposed convincing arguments, maybe besides the accusation that he trivialized the problem of scientific method – however it seems that was exactly his point (the said authors simply lacked the sense of humor and sarcasm).
So we've come to the end of philosophy of science. Surely some later works were conducted, but with rather moderate successes. Chalmers tried some mild de-relativization of Kuhn's paradigms, which frankly didn't convince me much (perhaps I just didn't understand him but hey, I'm not a philosopher!). Wojciech Sady recently wrote a book where he extends Kuhn's theory of science with even more historical data in order to explain how revolutions occur: contemporaries of the revolution are not aware of their future impact, and they don't intend to ,,wreck the current paradigm'', just continue doing the normal science. In an interview for Copernicus Center Sady explained he’s trying to get rid of the ridiculous and harmful myth of ,,a genius ahead of his time'' by pointing out how physicists like Maxwell or Plank ignored their results which were later found to be revolutionary. But this you can read yourself.
To recap:
I can’t help summing up the above with a rather cheesy metaphor of how particular views of science would attempt studying swans:
Inductionism: we've observed 142 swans being white, therefore we can safely assume that all swans are white.
Popperism: with great pleasure we’ve observed the black swan, falsifying the whiteness of swans theory. We now come up with a stronger one: all animals are either black or white.
Kuhn: most scientists got really disappointed about the black swan. Some still insisted it was a measurement error, but the very presence of crisis pushed the interest of next generation to examination of colors of ducks.
Lakatos: at least those programs which didn't have whiteness-of-swans in their hard core remain intact and scientists will gradually migrate there. They will just remove some color hypotheses in the protective belt.
(Although if you read ,,Proofs and refutations'' [7] it'd be more like: for the last 200 years we wrote a lot about swans and the whiteness property was pretty useful. Let's redefine a swan so that it has to be white; then the black swans are not swans at all. We can call them ,,shwans'' now and develop a separate theory for that.)
Feyerabend: for the sake of individuality, I demand cutting swan study funding right now.
In the 1980s due to legal changes by Reagan's administration a sustained growth of university patenting in the US started, and then spilled all over the world. Academic scientists gained priority to patent their work and make money of them. Non-military national and private-sector grant programs flourished, and the idea that science and industry should go hand in hand became not only a widely accepted but virtually an exclusive one, providing chief motivation for conducting any research at all.
In seeking effective ways of distributing the funds, at the turn of the centuries the governments introduced various scoring systems like Journal Ranking, Research Excellence Framework and other ,,indicators of research excellence''. Number of research publications grows exponentially, along with number of researchers themselves: around 1900 there were around 1100 publishing scientists (mostly physicists). On 2014 it was ~7.5 million, and on 2018 ~8.8million.
Surprisingly it seems that with growing number of scientists, the science itself (whatever it was) had disappeared. Overwhelmed by the ranking systems and grants and strong instituional pressures, perhaps it dissolved by evolving into laborious factory of tiny results which are ,,just enough’’ to push the technological excellence, resulting in smaller transistors, cheaper fertilizers, more homogeneous lenses for mobile devices and more durable batteries. Or perhaps it was no longer needed by anyone?
Substituting the word ,,science" for ,,art'' in the last essay by Jean Baudrillard [11]: ,,(...) for SCIENCE today, though it has disappeared, doesn't know it has disappeared and -- this is the worst of it -- continues on its trajectory in a vegetative state.''