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Priorities in Scientific Discovery: a Chapter in the Sociology of Science Author(S): Robert K Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science Author(s): Robert K. Merton Reviewed work(s): Source: American Sociological Review, Vol. 22, No. 6 (Dec., 1957), pp. 635-659 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2089193 . Accessed: 10/11/2012 19:21 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.224 on Sat, 10 Nov 2012 19:21:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions American SOCIOLOGICAL December Volume 22 1957 Review Number 6 OfficialJournal of the AmericanSociological Society PRIORITIES IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY: A CHAPTER IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE * ROBERT K. MERTON Columbia University W E can only guess what historians of the A Calendar of Disputes over Priority. We future will say about the condition of begin by noting the great frequency with present-day sociology. But it seems which the history of science is punctuated by safe to anticipate one of their observations. disputes, often by sordid disputes, over pri- When the Trevelyans of 2050 come to write ority of discovery. During the last three that history-as they well might, for this clan centuries in which modern science developed, of historians promises to go on forever- numerous scientists, both great and small, they will doubtless find it strange that so have engaged in such acrimonious contro- few sociologists (and historians) of the versy. Recall only these few: Keenly aware twentieth century could bring themselves, in of the importance of his inventions and dis- their work, to treat science as one of the coveries, Galileo became a seasoned cam- great social institutions of the time. They paigner as he vigorously defended his rights will observe that long after the sociology of to priority first, in his Defense against the science became an identifiable field of in- Calumnies and Impostures of Baldassar quiry,' it remained little cultivated in a Capar, where he showed how his invention world where science loomed large enough to of the "geometricand military compass" had present mankind with the choice of destruc- been taken frotn him, and then, in The As- tion or survival. They may even suggest sayer, where he flayed four other would be that somewhere in the process by which so- rivals; Father Horatio Grassi, who tried "to cial scientists take note of the world as it is diminish whatever praise there may be in and as it once was, a sense of values appears this [invention of the telescope for use in to have become badly scrambled. astronomy] which belongs to me"; Christo- This spacious area of neglect may there- pher Scheiner, who claimed to have been fore have room for a paper which tries to first to observe the sunspots (although, un- examine science as a social institution, not known to both Scheiner and Galileo, Johann in the large but in terms of a few of its Fabricius had published such observations principal components. before); an unspecified villain (probably the * FrenchmanJean Tarde) who "attempted Presidential address read at the annual meet- to rob me of ing of the American Sociological Society, August, that glory which was mine, pre- 1957. tending not to have seen my writings and 1 The rudiments of a sociology of science can trying to represent themselves as the original be found in an overview of the subject by Bernard discoverers of these marvels"; and finally, Barber,Science and the Social Order,Glencoe: The Simon Mayr, who Free Press, 1952; Bernard Barber, "Sociology of "had the gall to claim that Science: A Trend Report and Bibliography," Cur- he had observed the Medicean planets which rent Sociology, Vol. 5, No. 2, Paris: UNESCO, 1957. revolve about Jupiter before I had [and 635 This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.224 on Sat, 10 Nov 2012 19:21:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 636 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICALREVIEW used] a sly way of attempting to establish inferred the existence and predicted the po- his priority." 2 sition of the planet now known as Neptune, The peerless Newton fought several bat- which was found where their independent tles with Robert Hooke over priority in op- computations showed it would be. Medicine tics and celestial mechanics and entered into had its share of conflicts over priority; for a long and painful controversy with Leibniz example, Jenner believed himself first to over the invention of the calculus. Hooke,3 demonstrate that vaccination afforded se- who has been described as the "universal curity against smallpox, but the advocates claimant" because "there was scarcely a dis- of Pearson and Rabaut believed otherwise. covery in his time which he did not conceive Throughout the nineteenth century and himself to claim," (and, it might be added, down to the present, disputes over priority often justly so, for he was one of the most continued to be frequent and intense. Lister inventive men in his century of genius), knew he had first introduced antisepsis, but Hooke, in turn, contested priority not only others insisted that Lemaire had done so be- with Newton but with Huygens over the fore. The sensitive and modest Faraday was important invention of the spiral-springbal- wounded by the claims of others to several of ance for regulating watches to eliminate the his major discoveries in physics: one among effect of gravity. these, the discovery of electromagnetic ro- The calendar of disputes was full also in tation, was said to have been made before the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most by Wollaston; Faraday's onetime mentor, tedious and sectarian of these was the great Sir Humphrey Davy (who had himself been "Water Controversy"in which that shy, rich, involved in similar disputes) actually op- and noble genius of science, Henry Caven- posed Faraday's election to the Royal So- dish, was pushed into a three-way tug-of-war ciety on the ground that his was not the with Watt and Lavoisier over the question of original discovery.4 Laplace, several of the which one had first demonstrated the com- Bernoullis, Legendre, Gauss, Cauchy were pound nature of water and thereby removed only a few of the giants among mathemati- it from its millennia-long position as one of cians embroiled in quarrels over priority. the elements. Earthy battles raged also over What is true of physics, chemistry, as- claims to the first discovery of heavenly tronomy, medicine and mathematics is true bodies, as in the case of the most dramatic also of all the other scientific disciplines, not astronomical discovery of the century in excluding the social and psychological sci- which the Englishman John Couch Adams ences. As we know, sociology was officially and the Frenchman Urban Jean LeVerrier born only after a long period of abnormally severe labor. Nor was the postpartum any 2 Galileo, The Assayer, 1623, translated by Still- more tranquil. It was disturbed by violent Galileo, man Drake in Discoveries and Opinions of controversies between the followers of St.- New York: Doubleday, 1957, pp. 232-233, 245. Galileo thought it crafty of Mayr to date his book Simon and Comte as they quarreledover the as published in 1609 by using the Julian calendar delicate question of which of the two was without indicating that, as a Protestant, he had not the father of sociology and which merely accepted the Gregorian calendar adopted by "us the obstetrician. And to come to the very Catholics" which would have shifted the date of publication to January 1610, when Galileo had recent past, Janet is but one among several reported having made his first observations. Later to have claimed that they had the essentials in this paper, I shall have more to say about the of psycho-analysis before Freud. implications of attaching importance to such short To extend the list of priority fights would intervals separating rival claims to priority. 3 For scholarly reappraisals of Hooke's role in be industrious and, for this occasion, super- developing the theor: of gravitation, see Louis fluous. For the moment, it is enough to note Diehl Patterson, "Hooke's Gravitation Theory and that these controversies, far from being a Its Influence on Newton," Isis, 40 (November, rare exception in science, have long been fre- 32-45; 1949), pp. 327-341; 41 (March, 1950), pp. and have practi- and E. N. da C. Andrade, "Robert Hooke," Wilkins quent, harsh, ugly. They Lecture, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B, cally become an integral part of the social Biological Sciences, 137 (24 July, 1950). The recent biography by Margaret 'Espinasse is too uncritical 4 Bence Jones, The Life and Letters of Faraday, and defensive of Hooke to be satisfactory; Robert London: Longmans, Green, 1870, Vol. I, pp. 336- Hooke, London: Heinemann, 1956. 352. This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.72.224 on Sat, 10 Nov 2012 19:21:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions PRIORITIES IN SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY 637 relations between scientists. Indeed, the pat- On other occasions, self-denial has gone tern is so common that the Germans have even further.
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