According to Horace Freeland Judson, author of The Great Betrayal,
grandees of the scientific establishment regularly proclaim that scientific fraud is vanishingly rare and that perpetrators are isolated individuals who act out of a twisted psychopathology. As a corrolary, they insist that science is self-correcting. ... They could not be so dogmatic if they had considered what evidence there is that might back up general conclusions, positive or negative, about the nature and incidence of scientific fraud. Their claims about fraud are unscientific." (26-7)The implication here is that Judson himself is in a position to provide evidence that backs up negative general conclusions about the nature and incidence of scientific fraud. Let's see.
First modify the claim to the following:
[Modified Self-Correction] Science is structured in such a way that fraudulent research either has relatively trivial results (both in terms of its detrimental effects for the edifice of science and of its positive effects for the perpetrator of the fraud) or is doomed to be revealed as fraudulent.That is, either the fraud concerns a result so trivial that it will not impinge upon central result in any area of science, nor bring great credit upon the perpetrator of the fraud, or the fraud concerns a result so central that it is bound to be discovered in relatively short order. I'll call this the MSC thesis. My suggestion is that none of Judson's evidence provides better support for another, more negative claim, than it does for MSC.
Judson himself recognizes that "the brute fact is that many published papers, tens of thousands every year, are ignored. They are not woven into the fabric [of science]; they are cited rarely or not at all except perhaps by their authors. Such vanishing papers are not part of live science." (37) If this is the case, however, then certainly fraudulent research leading to such "vanishing papers" would hardly pose a significant challenge to the edifice of science. Let's call these the insignificant results; they would seem to be covered by the first disjunct of MSC. So any support for a more negative finding by Judson would seem to rest on the significant laboratory results.
Judson suggests that "significant laboratory results don't normally get verified ... for three reasons ... . Two of them are institutional: repeating other scientists' work is not an enterprise that attracts funding, and journals rarely publish negative results. The third reason lies in the practical problems of laboratory research: some experiments can't be rerun." (39)
Let's grant that significant results are never verified -- in the sense of being performed again -- and that this is the case for the reasons Judson cites. Nevertheless, if the results are significant, as we are assuming, then the results will be indirectly verified. This will occur in at least two ways.
First,
when you publish an interesting new result, your closest competitor on reading your paper slaps his forehead and exclaims, "Why didn't I think of that!" But then he realizes, "If that's true, why then the next step is X, and I'd better get back to the lab pronto." Confirmation is indirect: if the new finding works, it can be built into the growing edifice. (36)Indirect confirmation, however, is still -- at least provisionally -- confirmation. Indeed, there is no reason why such indirect confirmation shouldn't provide at least as much evidential confirmation as a successful repetition of an initial experiment.
Second,
In much science, confirmation comes about by the use of independent but neighboring and convergent approaches and results -- hence, triangulation. ... [T]he mid-nineteenth century philosopher and historian of science William Whewell called this by the satisfying phrase "the consilience of inductions." ... Triangulation can yield new findings. It allows the scientist building on another's claimed result to receive credit. It provides cross-checks that will undermine a claim or make it more robust. (36)
The example that Judson cites of triangulation (or consilience), the determination of Avogadro's number "from a variety of unrelated methods" at the beginning of the 20th century, is a stark example of the powerful evidence that such triangulation can provide.
Where does this leave the prospects for a negative finding concerning the significance of fraud in science? It seems that the only potentially damaging case would be a significant finding that wasn't potentially testable in terms of the first sort of indirect confirmation or of triangulation. Such a finding, however, could hardly be termed significant. Thus, it would seem impossible to give a case supporting a more negative thesis than MSC.
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