|
A peer-reviewed
electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 17(1)
– March 2008 |
Making Science by Serendipity.
A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures
of Serendipity
Riccardo Campa,
Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University
at Cracow
Journal
of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 17 Issue 1 – March 2008- pgs 75-83
http://jetpress.org/v17/campa.html
Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The
Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004)
is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book
about a word may surprise those who are not acquainted with Merton’s work, but
certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master. Searching,
defining, and formulating concepts has always been Merton’s main intellectual
activity.
It is somewhat of a ritual among Merton’s
commentators to thank him for the numberless concepts with which he has
furnished sociological research. Barbano (1968: 65) notices that one of
Merton’s constant preoccupations is with language and the definition of
concepts and recognizes that the function of the latter is for him anything but
ornamental. Sztompka (1986: 98) writes that “the next phase chosen by Merton
for methodological discussion is that of concepts-formation. Achieving clarity,
precision and unambiguous meaning of sociological concepts seems to be an
almost obsessive preoccupation.”
What should be clear is that he does not
formulate concepts by chance. Many sociologists formulate important concepts by
building a new theory of society, but this is not what Merton does. He
completely renounced the building of his own total system of theory and did not
even spend so much time in trying to elaborate theories of the middle range. He
has dedicated almost all his time to concept-formation. This is why he has not
given us only some concepts but many. Merton proposes an
articulated technical language now widely used by sociologists and is perfectly
aware of the strategic importance of this work.
The
following quotation can be seen as evidence of his awareness of the heuristic
power of concepts:
As we have seen, we
experience socially expected durations in every department of social life and
in a most varied form. […] That ubiquity of phenomenal SEDs may lead them to
blend, conceptually unnoticed, into the taken-for-granted social background
rather than to be differentiated into a possibly illuminating concept directing
us to their underlying similarities. As Wittgenstein once observed with
italicized feeling: “How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my
eyes!” (Merton 1996: 167.)
Of course, we did not have to wait for
Wittgenstein or Merton to understand the importance of words to the scientific
and philosophical discourse. It had been realized already in Medieval times
that talia sunt objecta qualia determinatur a praedicatis suis. But then
again, as Whitehead used to say and Merton (1973: 8) used to repeat:
“Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover
it.”
If Merton and Barber invested energies in
writing the history of a word, I feel it now necessary to write a few words
about the history of their book. The travels and adventures of the book are not
less fascinating than the content of the book itself. It was in the 1930s that
Merton first came upon the concept-and-term of serendipity in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here, he
discovered that the word had been coined by Walpole, and was based on the title
of the fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which
“were always making discoveries by accidents and sagacity, of things they were
not in quest of.”
The
discovery of the word was serendipitous as well, since Merton was not looking
for it. In this sense, it was self-exemplifying. The word could not fail to
trigger him, considering that at the time he was busy with the foundation of
the sociology of science – more
precisely and quite significantly with the elaboration of a sociological theory
of scientific discovery (Merton 1973: 281 et seq.) – and with the formulation of the idea of the
unanticipated consequences of social action (see Merton 1996: 173 et seq). As
Rob Norton (2002) recognizes: “The first and most complete analysis of the
concept of unintended consequences was done in 1936 by the American sociologist
Robert K. Merton.” In this way, the combined etymological and sociological
quest began that resulted in The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
Initially, the book was conceived as a “preparazione
OTSOGIA.” In other words, it was to serve as a propedeutic to Merton’s seminal
work – On the Shoulders of
Giants, acronymised to OTSOG and published in 1965. Nonetheless, after
completion in 1958, the book on serendipity was intentionally left
unpublished. Probably the authors had the impression that when finished the
book had lost some of its novelty. And the situation got “worse” year after
year. We find some information about it in the long and insightful afterword
written by Merton just prior to his death (in my modest opinion, one of the
most interesting parts of the book). In it, Merton provides interesting statistics
to illustrate how quickly the word had spread since 1958. By that time,
serendipity had been used in print only 135 times. But between 1958 and 2000,
serendipity had appeared in the titles of 57 books. Furthermore, the word was
used in newspapers 13,000 times during the 1990s and in 636,000 documents on
the World Wide Web in 2001.
In any
case, the book was occasionally and most tantalizingly cited in Merton’s other
publications. In 1990, OTSOG was translated into Italian and published with an
introduction by Umberto Eco. The Italian publisher noticed a footnote
mentioning the existence of the still unpublished The Travels and Adventures
of Serendipity and proposed its publication in Italian. The authors agreed
to an Italian translation, but Merton posed the condition that it had to be
enriched by a long afterword. The translation was quickly made, but the
publisher had to wait a decade to have the long and precious appendice.
The reason for such a delay was the many ailments that Merton had had to battle
with before his death. The Italian version was published in 2002, after
Barber’s death. Two years later and a year after Merton’s death, we could
welcome the appearance of the original English version.
Now let
us focus on an analysis of the content of the book and its theoretical
consequences, that is, on the history of this term-and-concept and its
significance to the sociology of science. The first few chapters elucidate the
origin of the word, beginning with the 1557 publication of The Three Princes
of Serendip in Venice. This is a story about the deductive powers of the
sons of the philosopher-king of Serendip. However, the princes did not have
their adventures in Serendip but in neighboring lands, and the king is named
Jaffer. The modern association of Sri Lanka with serendipity is therefore
erroneous (Boyle 2000).
In a
letter to Horace Mann dated January 28, 1754, Walpole described an amazing
discovery as being “of that kind which I call Serendipity.” He went on to
provide his succinct definition but then blurred it by providing an inadequate
example from The Three Princes: “As their highnesses travelled, they
were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they
were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of
the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten
only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right – now do you understand serendipity?”
Walpole tried to illustrate the concept of
serendipity with other examples, but basically failed to do it in an
unequivocal way. After many decades, in 1833, Walpole’s correspondence with
Horace Mann was published. Through this and other editions of the letters, the
word serendipity entered into the literary circle.
Merton and Barber do not fail to study and
emphasize the social and historical context that permits the acceptance and
diffusion of the neologism. The nineteenth century is the century of industrial
revolution. It is a period of extraordinary expansion for science and
technology, marked by the foundation of numerous new scientific disciplines,
sociology included. As the authors (2004: 46) remark: “It is in the nature of
science that new concepts, facts, and instruments constantly emerge, and there
is a continual concomitant need for new terms to designate them. With the
accelerated pace of scientific development in the nineteenth century, the need
for new terms was frequently felt and as frequently met by the construction of
neologisms. Scientists had no antipathy to new words as such: hundreds and then
thousands were being coined…”
Serendipity was used in print for the first time
by another writer forty-two years after the publication of Walpole’s letters.
Edward Solly had the honor of launching serendipity into literary circles. He
signed an article on Notes and Queries, a periodical founded in 1849 by
the learned bibliophile William John Thoms. Solly defined serendipity as “a
particular kind of natural cleverness”. In other words, he stressed Walpole’s
implication that serendipity was a kind of innate gift or trait. However,
Walpole was also talking of serendipity as a kind of discovery. The ambiguity
was never overcome and serendipity still indicates both a personal attribute
and an event or phenomenon. It’s worth noting that after the first appearance
in print, “[f]or more then fifty years, serendipity was to be used almost
exclusively by people who were most particularly concerned with the writing,
reading, and collecting of books” (Merton and Barber 2004: 48).
From the
turn of the twentieth century, serendipity gained acceptance for its aptness of
meaning among a wider and more varied literary circle and the word appeared in
all the “big” and medium-sized English and American dictionaries between 1909
and 1934. Its 1951 inclusion in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary
was of equal importance as it reflected the higher probability of the casual
reader encountering the word as it filtered down from academia. Moreover, the
word passed from the Oxford English Dictionary into Merton’s personal
vocabulary.
When
outlining the lexicographical history of the word the authors reveal
disparities in definition (see Merton and Barber 2004: 104-122 and 246-247). In
1909 the word is defined by The Century Dictionary as “the happy faculty
or luck of finding by ‘accidental sagacity’” or the “discovery of things
unsought.” But the double meaning disappears in the 1913 definition provided by
Funk and Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary of the English Language where
serendipity is uniquely “the ability to find valuable things unexpectedly.” In
addition, in the Swan’s Anglo-American Dictionary (1952), serendipity is
just an event and no more a personal attribute: “the sheer luck or accident of
making a discovery by mere good fortune or when searching for something else.”
To avoid both the ambiguities of the meaning and the disappearance of one of
the meanings, Piotr Zielonka and I (2003) decided to translate serendipity into
Polish by using two different neologisms: “serendypizm” and “serendypicja” – to refer to the event and the personal
attribute respectively.
The disparities in definition also concern other
aspects. While the Century Dictionary was stressing the role of
sagacity, The Oxford English Dictionary in 1912-13 does not mention this
aspect and defines serendipity as “the faculty of making happy and unexpected
discoveries by accident”. Other definitions do not meet Walpole’s prescription
of a gift for discovery by accident and sagacity while in pursuit of something
else. These incomplete definitions have resulted in the wrong belief that
“accidental discovery” is synonymous with serendipity.
Even if
Merton waited four decades to publish his book on serendipity, he made wide use
of the concept in his theorizing. In 1946, Merton revealed his concept of the
“serendipity pattern” in empirical research, of observing an
unanticipated, anomalous, and strategic datum, which becomes the occasion for
developing a new theory. In this way Merton contributes to the history he maps
out.
It is
worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and
examining the sociological and philosophical implications of this idea. In the
1930s, by facing the problems of the newly born discipline called the sociology
of knowledge, Merton works to eliminate some lacunas left by his predecessors.
In a similar way to Ludwik Fleck (1979), Merton is convinced that no reason
impedes considering the so-called hard sciences as subject matter for the
sociology of knowledge. The sociology of knowledge cannot limit its subject
matter to the historical, political and social sciences. This is the frontier
reached by Mannheim, but the American sociologist holds that it is necessary to
go further. “Had Mannheim systematically and explicitly clarified his position
in this respect, he would have been less disposed to assume that the physical
sciences are wholly immune from extra-theoretical influences and,
correlatively, less inclined to urge that the social sciences are peculiarly
subject to such influences” (Merton 1968: 552). Thanks to this new awareness,
the sociology of science came into existence. As Mario Bunge (1998: 232)
remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real
founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession;
his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”
Certainly, the sociology of science has
subsequently evolved in new directions, not all predicted by his father. The
most common accusation leveled against Merton is that he has never really
studied the impact of society upon science, intended as a cultural and
cognitive product. He has concentrated his attention on institutions and norms,
and neglected epistemological problems. Consequently, it is now common to
distinguish between two programs in the sociology of science: the “weak,”
pursued by Robert Merton and the Mertonians, which concerns the study of
institutions and, thus, produces epistemologically irrelevant results; the
“strong,” pursued by David Bloor (1976) and the sociologists of the new
generation, which concerns the study of the contents of science and, thus,
produces epistemologically relevant results.
It is
true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not
laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said
that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of
science. His attention to the concept of serendipity is the best evidence of
parallel attention to the very content of scientific discoveries and the way
they are made. “Since it is the special task of scientists to make discoveries,
they themselves have often been concerned to understand the conditions under
which discoveries are made and use that knowledge to further the making of
discoveries. Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the
elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of
scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the
results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159). The authors present a
considerable number of quotations showing that many scientists, historians and
philosophers of science have been aware of the fact that scientific inquiry
cannot be metaphorically represented as hunting a hare (searching for a
specific applicable scientific theory) with a rifle (the rules of scientific
method). Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity,
you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for
hares.
The
authors also do not fail to present the resistance to the idea of serendipity.
For orthodox Marxists, scientific and technological discoveries are a product
of necessity. The slavery mode of production does not need machines, while the
capitalistic mode of production needs them. Thus, the industrial revolution of
the eighteenth century is related to the development of physics and the
invention of machinery. “To orthodox Marxists, the suggestion that discoveries
could be occasioned by accidents rather than by the inexorable development of
the material base of society was anathema. Since the Marxists believe that all
social and physical phenomena are rigidly determined, inventions are, in
principle, predictable, and the job of the historian or philosopher of science
is to work out ways of predicting them” (Merton and Barber 2004: 166). However,
by using the adjective “orthodox”, the authors implicitly recognize that not
all Marxists share this rigidly deterministic view of social and natural reality.
Even if Merton did not publish his monographic
work on serendipity until 2004, he has constantly referred to this category in
his theoretical work. In another writing, for instance, he makes the step from
description to prescription:
historians and sociologists must both examine
the various sorts of “failure”: intelligent errors and unintelligent ones,
noetically induced and organizationally induced foci of interest and blind
spots of inquiry, promising leads abandoned and garden-paths long explored,
scientific contributions ignored or neglected by contemporaries and, to draw
the sampling to a close, they must examine not only cases of serendipity gained
but of serendipity lost (as with the many instances of the antibiotic effects
of penicillin having been witnessed but not discovered). (Merton 1975: 9.)
The
Baconian and positivist dream of elaborating a set of methodological rules
capable of also opening the door to scientific discovery to people of modest
intelligence and sagacity cannot be better challenged than by the idea of
serendipity. Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin,
Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity
has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164) emphasizes that:
“Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the
psychological source of an idea. (Remember only Kekulé’s dream and intuited
imagery of the benzene ring which converted the idea of the mere number of
atoms in a molecule into the structural idea of their being arranged in a
pattern resulting from the valences of different kinds of atoms.)” In this,
Merton seems to be very close to Bachelard, Popper, Bunge, and the
neorationalists in general. Bachelard (1938), for example, emphasizes the
importance of abstraction as the only way to approach scientific truth. The
Popperian idea that theories come from the sky is well known. Finally, one of
the most systematic studies of intuition in science has been proposed by Mario
Bunge (1962).
However, Merton does not consider the problem of
methodology solvable with the elimination of the context of discovery and the
improvement of the context of justification. The problem of discovery is what
Oldroyd (1986) would define as the ascending part of the arch of knowledge – from the object-level to theory – that cannot be settled by merely replacing
induction with intuition/invention, as Popper suggests. It is still both
possible and worthwhile to study this problem from a psychological and sociological
point of view. The serendipity pattern is Merton’s proposal to attempt
to complete the hypothetical-deductive model, which is a logical model, and so
fails to describe much of what actually occurs in fruitful investigation.
The serendipity pattern
refers to the fairly common experience of observing an unanticipated,
anomalous and strategic datum which becomes the occasion for developing a
new theory or for extending an existing theory… The datum is, first of all,
unanticipated. A research directed toward the test of one hypothesis yields a
fortuitous by-product, an unexpected observation which bears upon theories not
in question when the research was begun. Secondly, the observation is
anomalous, surprising, either because it seems inconsistent with prevailing
theory or with other established facts. In either case, the seeming
inconsistency provokes curiosity… And thirdly, in noting that the unexpected
fact must be strategic, i.e., that it must permit of implications which
bear upon generalized theory, we are, of course, referring rather to what the
observer brings to the datum than to the datum itself. For it obviously
requires a theoretically sensitized observer to detect the universal in the
particular. (Merton 1968: 157-162.)
The proposal of the serendipity pattern can be
interpreted as a convergence toward Peirce’s metascience. Merton (1968: 158)
writes: “Charles Sanders Peirce had long before noticed the strategic role of
the ‘surprising fact’ in his account of what he called ‘abduction,’ that is, the
initiation and entertaining of a hypothesis as a step in inference.” This
pattern can be assimilated to Peirce’s abduction, Thomas’ modus ponendo
ponens, or Galileo’s reasoning ex suppositione (see Wallace 1981).
One observes a fact F. This fact is surprising and cannot be explained with
existing theories. Hence, stimulated by the problem, one formulates a new
theoretical hypothesis T. If T were “true,” then F would be obvious, therefore
one has good reason to suspect that T is “true.” Of course, this logical model
does not actually guarantee the correctness of T, despite the fact that Thomas
seemed to believe so. According to Merton, T remains a conjecture, which must
be submitted to other social and rational procedures in order to be accepted as
certified knowledge by the scientific community.
This descriptive model has many important
implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration
and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between
investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific
discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the
historian of science, but it raises further problems for research
administrators. If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the
social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The
Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. Merton and Barber (2004: 199)
underline that “[r]esearch administrators may be authoritarian or they may be
permissive, they may see the interests of the individual scientists as being
identical with those of the organization as a whole or they may not, and such
preferences for relative autonomy and independence or for relatively rigid
control may be refracted through the problem of the legitimacy or desirability
of serendipity.”
The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between
total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.
The experience of Langmuir as a scientist in the General Electric laboratories
under Willis Whitney’s direction proves the importance of the autonomy and fun
of the individual researcher, together with the concern of the administrator.
Langmuir decided autonomously to study high vacuum and tungsten filaments. Whitney
supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking:
“Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt,
without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot
plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:
To put Langmuir’s
argument another way, dictatorship in the laboratory and the political sphere
is as impractical as it is morally repugnant; it runs counter to what men of
the eighteenth century would have called the “natural laws” of society in
general and the world of science in particular. The policy of leaving nothing
to chance is inherently doomed by failure: It flies in the face of human
nature, and especially the nature of rational, independent scientists. (Merton
and Barber 2004: 201.)
The peculiar thing about the serendipity pattern
is that it weakens not only the Baconian, positivistic, inductivistic approach
to knowledge, but also the opposite sociologistic, constructivistic and
relativistic temptation to see the content of scientific theories as
necessarily and fully determined by the social context. If scientists are determined
by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find
certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own
observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is
that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we
already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our
conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.
The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity has
rapidly gained the fame it deserves (see
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/quotes/q7576.html). Cristina Gonzalez, in Science,
defines it as “A fascinating text that captivates the reader from the start.”
Steve Shapin, in American Scientist, remarks that “It is a pity that we
had to wait so long for it, since The
Travels and Adventures of Serendipity is the great man’s greatest achievement.”
According to Philip Howard, The Times (London), “This is the best
written and most entertaining book of sociology ever written”. For the Nobel
Laureate Roald Hoffmann, “Curiosity, wonder, openness – these cohabit, comfortably, in that marvellous
coinage of Walpole, serendipity. And they mark as well Merton and Barber’s
ebullient journey in search of all the meanings of the word. A romp of minds at
play!” The review by the distinguished historian of science Gerald Holton is
enthusiastic: “What a splendid book! The
Adventures and Travels of Serendipity is not only a guide to the
extraordinary history and present-day usefulness of the blessings that can come
from those unplanned, accidental events which, sagaciously employed, can shape
one’s life. But equally, the volume is an exemplification of superb scholarship
presented in graceful style. Indeed, while reading the book one realizes that
one perceives its unique subject matter from the vantage of standing on the
shoulders of giants.” Harold M. Green predicts that “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity is destined to become a
classic in the history and philosophy of science.”
Robert
K. Merton has been my master and before dying honored me by quoting my work in
his universally praised masterpiece. This might be thought to have prejudiced
me in favor of this book, thus I will not add my own praise to the long list
presented above. I would only like to express my hope that Green’s prophecy is
fulfilled.
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