Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Many philosophers have made analogies between science and the market, or between scientists and entrepreneurs. These analogies are used to buttress claims about how science ought to be organized: that science ought to be administered or regulated, or that science must be autonomous. This dissertation examines and evaluates market analogies, and ways in which the changing organization of science reflects those analogies. In the first chapter I examine Michael Polanyi's dispute with John Desmond Bernal over whether science ought to be centrally controlled, and I argue that Polanyi's account of spontaneous order in science fails. In the second I compare Philip Kitcher's model of scientist-entrepreneurs with the general equilibrium model of Arrow and Debreu and conclude that Kitcher's model lacks crucial features of the latter. In the third chapter I examine Alan Walstad's Austrian account of science and argue that his analogy fails because citations fail to fulfill all of the important functions of money in the traditional economy. In the fourth chapter I evaluate science from the perspective of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) and conclude that science is not epistemically efficient in the way that the EMH claims markets are, and then I examine ways in which science might be made more epistemically efficient through the use of prediction markets. In the final chapter I consider how, through commodification, science is becoming more like the market, and I show that this change in the organization of science allows for increased scientific collaboration, but also facilitates the commercialization of science and all of its associated dangers.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Michael Thicke
Language: English
Subfield: Management of Technology and Innovation
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2738395241