Scientists fight bitterly over priority because recognition is the field's only currency, so disputes are structural rather than personal failings.
Newton and Leibniz on calculus, Darwin and Wallace on selection. Merton's point is that the disputes are produced by the reward structure, so treating them as personal failings misdiagnoses them.
In practice
- Two teams reach the same architecture independently and spend a quarter arguing about whose proposal it was.
- Two departments both claim the cost saving in the annual report, and the dispute is about credit rather than about the saving.
- Standing
- Explains why multiple discovery and Stigler's law of eponymy generate so much conflict.
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- The ways evidence misleads