Dva načina razotkrivanja znanstvene prijevare

In spite of the awareness of the existence of scientific malpractice and of irrelevance of a great body of scientific research, science has barely lost any credibility. This is mainly because it is still assumed that science is normally a self policing and self correcting practice, and that it is perhaps the only human endeavor where no external force of control is needed. According to that opinion, represented most notably by Robert Merton, bad methodologies, procedural mistakes, statistical make-up of data, false claims, fraud, will sooner or later be checked and thrown into oblivion. But this self-correcting-science assumption has increasingly been put in doubt. In another classical book in the field, Betrayers of the truth, by Nicholas Broad and Wade, authors cite numerous examples and reasons why this self correcting science assumption does not work. They begin their pathology of science with the following words: “According to conventional wisdom, science is a strictly logical process, objectivity is the essence... and scientific claims are rigorously checked by peer scrutiny and the replication of experiments. From this self-verifying system, error of all sorts is speedily and inexorably cast out. We began to doubt this view in the course of reporting some of the recent cases in which scientists had been discovered publishing results that were fictitious. (But) a more serious and general issue lay beneath these individual incidents: fraud was a phenomenon which the conventional ideology of science could not properly account for; therefor the ideology itself must be flawed or seriously incomplete... Fraud, we believe, offers another route to understanding science. By studying science through its pathology... it is easier to see the process as it is, as distinct from how it ought to be... Our conclusion in brief, is that science bears little resemblance to its conventional portrait... Science should not be considered the guardian of rationality in society, but merely one major form of its cultural expression.” (Broad & Wade, 1982:7-8)