Seminars of Philosophy of Perception, Mind, and Language

In exploring the structure of scientific knowledge, historians and philosophers of science for a long time have emphasized the cases of scientific discoveries made by independent researchers, or by teams acting as quasi-individuals. Special attention has been devoted to important questions pertaining the priority and independence of a discovery made by several scientists independent of each other within a short period of time, the competition and rivalry among researchers, scientists’ resistance to novelty, and several micro-sociological aspects involved in the process of discovery itself. It is not difficult to find appropriate historical cases (and possibly case studies) for each of these issues throughout the spectrum of sciences : according to Kuhn (1977a), the discovery of the principle of energy conservation by H. Helmholtz, J.R. Mayer, and J.P. Joule provides a model for simultaneous discoveries made by independent researchers. A notorious case of competition among rival teams in modern science is the HIV-dispute between Gallo and Montagnier and their équipes and national communities (see e.g. Shilts, 1987). Finally, the rejection of Ignác F. Semmelweis’ ideas about the antiseptic procedures by the Viennese medical community can serve as an instance of what I named scientists’ resistance to novelty (see e.g. Lesky, 1964). In each of these examples we are obviously faced with different historical, epistemological, and social conditions, which should be (and have been) carefully analyzed, taking into account the peculiarities of each single case. Nevertheless, considering them together, they point out the important role generally ascribed to the competitive dimension in the process of scientific discovery.

By contrast, recent history of science has pointed out epistemic ‘fluidity’ of concept definitions as one of the most important features of the scientific research as an activity of innovation, and this obviously affects even the scientific discovery and its authorship. In this vein, this paper raises the problem of the authorship of Uranus discovery by studying the micro-context in which the ‘planet’ was ‘first’ observed in 1781-82, i.e. the people who made and worked on the observations and the networks linking them. (And in the final section I suggest that the collaborative dimension emerging from this reconstruction might be epistemologically relevant, since it seems to reveal something about the structure of the astronomical knowledge). So, this paper outlines a type of scientific discovery that seems rather different from the examples provided above: one in which priority questions are not particularly relevant, collaboration is more important than competition, researchers are not mutually independent of each other, and resistance to new findings is so marginal that practically plays no role. For this intriguing case, I propose the term of shared discovery.