How Could Science be Different?

Science as a profession places contradictory expectations on scientists, both regarding the nature of knowledge generation and as a practice. In the current system, scientists need to be creative, bold, and driven, while simultaneously being reliable, predictable, and rigorous. These contradictory expectations are detrimental for scientists themselves and the scientific endeavor. In other professions a division of labor between the creative and the reliable is common. For science to function, it needs to follow the same path. Science needs to be separated into the science arts and the science crafts, with corresponding artist and artisan professions. Scientific artists would be creative and daring, as high risk-high gain freelancers, while scientific artisans would be predictable and service-oriented, in low risk-low gain employment. A separation of labor would be the adequate response to human bias towards one’s own hypotheses. Also, by accepting the incremental process of science, we will overcome the expectation that scientific outputs need to be “surprising”. Taken together, we will finally embrace that science as a human practice is predominantly “normal science”. Such a system, however, needs extrinsic “attacks” as impulses for testing uncommon theories and allow for paradigm shifts. Such a balance of normal and “revolutionary” science is necessary, because science is necessarily inductive. Creativity and speculation are needed to generate ideas and challenge the old, but left unchecked, they undermine the scientific enterprise. Ideation and confirmation need to be clearly distinct, while interlocked, systems. I thus propose a separation into scientific artists and scientific artisans to implement this distinction in practice and ensure reliable progress towards a corroborated body of knowledge. I also point out covert similarities to the current scientific system, and discuss several practical questions which arise, including the two professions’ interactions, their respective tasks, and the future of third-party funding, education, journals, and conferences.

Evgeny Bobrov

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