Synthese Topical Collection: Gatekeeping in Science

The topical collection, is co-edited by Katherine Dormandy (Innsbruck) and Eric Winsberg (Cambridge, South Florida).

Science, which we may understand broadly as the natural, social and human sciences, depends on gatekeeping to maintain its epistemic credentials. It must keep out pretenders while remaining porous to outside-the-box insights and to criticisms of its own shibboleths. Overly lenient or overly strict gatekeeping can get science in trouble – we might let in racist biology, or keep out the next Einstein. Yet gatekeeping in science is far from straightforward, with many issues needing philosophical elucidation.

One is that gatekeeping, like science itself, is a human activity and thus vulnerable to groupthink, prestige bias, and careerism, as well as to the influence of ideologies, or problematic background assumptions or conceptual frameworks. Political and financial pressures are also well documented risks. Another issue is the difficulty in solving the demarcation problem, which, though an expression of science’s creativity and flexibility, makes science vulnerable to unprincipled gatekeeping.

A third issue is that it is natural to leave gatekeeping to individual scientific disciplines since they surely know best what they are doing – but it is unclear whether object-level expertise translates to the meta-level competencies needed to gatekeep effectively. And this raises the additional concern that interdisciplinary researchers are vulnerable to weak links among poorly gatekeeping collaborators. Fourth, individual disciplines and research programs in their current form result largely from contingent historical processes; we cannot take for granted that gatekeeping worked smoothly to get them there, raising questions about the scientific status they currently enjoy.

And bad gatekeeping has social upshots, both for science and the broader public. For example, accusations of pseudoscience and disinformation, even when made in good faith by established scientists, can be weaponized to shut down the very debate on which scientific integrity depends. In this way and others, bad gatekeeping can damage public trust in science, perhaps in some cases deservedly. And bad gatekeeping can have wide-reaching practical consequences – not just in areas such as the natural sciences that feed technology or medical development, but also in areas such as the humanities that shape thought and ideology.

This topical issue invites contributions on any facet of gatekeeping in science. For suggested topics see the Call on the Synthese Website, link.springer.com/collections/dijeggebce

All submissions will undergo the usual Synthese review process. For further information, please contact the guest editor(s):

Katherine Dormandy: katherine.dormandy@uibk.ac.at

Eric Winsberg: Ew652@cam.ac.uk