The academic mode

Science is a mode of knowledge production. Its social norms are inseparable from its epistemic norms – what philosophers call its regulative principles. Scientists' ideas about what should count as ‘the truth’ cannot be disentangled from the ways they work together in pursuing it. The philosophy of academic science is part and parcel of its culture.

The regulative principles of academic science are thus important components of its ethos. They are actually so familiar to most scientists, and are stated so often in different forms, that it is not easy to produce a standard list. The simplest way of describing them is to say that they involve such concepts as theory, conjecture, experiment, observation, discovery, objectivity, inference, etc., which we shall be analysing in detail in later chapters.

The significant point here is that although these are usually taken to be independent philosophical concepts they can be directly linked with sociological aspects of the academic ethos. For example, the norm of ‘communalism’ is closely connected with the principle of empiricism – that is, reliance on the results of replicable observation and experiment. Again, social ‘universalism’ is related to explanatory unification; ‘disinterestedness’ is normally associated with belief in an objective reality; insistence on ‘originality’ motivates conjectures and discoveries; ‘organized scepticism’ requires that these be fully tested and justified before being accepted as established knowledge. And so on.

This correlation with the Mertonian norms accords with our naturalistic approach.