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"These inventive presentations promise to strengthen our human abilities. And, perhaps, to rationally evolve our shared human culture and teach us to wisely manage our world."
Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The
Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004)
is the history of a word and its related concept.
Barbano (1968: 65) notices that one of
Merton’s constant preoccupations is with language and the definition of
concepts and recognizes that the function of the latter is for him anything but
ornamental.
Merton proposes an
articulated technical language now widely used by sociologists and is perfectly
aware of the strategic importance of this work.
Walpole tried to illustrate the concept of
serendipity with other examples, but basically failed to do it in an
unequivocal way.
It was in the 1930s that
Merton first came upon the concept-and-term of serendipity in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here, he
discovered that the word had been coined by Walpole, and was based on the title
of the fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which
“were always making discoveries by accidents and sagacity, of things they were
not in quest of.”
As
Rob Norton (2002) recognizes: “The first and most complete analysis of the
concept of unintended consequences was done in 1936 by the American sociologist
Robert K. Merton.” In this way, the combined etymological and sociological
quest began that resulted in The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
it was to serve as a propedeutic to Merton’s seminal
work – On the Shoulders of
Giants, acronymised to OTSOG and published in 1965.
Merton provides interesting statistics
to illustrate how quickly the word had spread since 1958. By that time,
serendipity had been used in print only 135 times. But between 1958 and 2000,
serendipity had appeared in the titles of 57 books. Furthermore, the word was
used in newspapers 13,000 times during the 1990s and in 636,000 documents on
the World Wide Web in 2001.
The Italian version was published in 2002, after
Barber’s death. Two years later and a year after Merton’s death, we could
welcome the appearance of the original English version.
Now let
us focus on an analysis of the content of the book and its theoretical
consequences, that is, on the history of this term-and-concept and its
significance to the sociology of science.
The first few chapters elucidate the
origin of the word, beginning with the 1557 publication of The Three Princes
of Serendip in Venice.
In a
letter to Horace Mann dated January 28, 1754, Walpole described an amazing
discovery as being “of that kind which I call Serendipity.”
in 1833, Walpole’s correspondence with
Horace Mann was published.
As Mario Bunge (1998: 232)
remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real
founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession;
his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”
Serendipity was used in print for the first time
by another writer forty-two years after the publication of Walpole’s letters.
Edward Solly had the honor
Solly defined serendipity as “a
particular kind of natural cleverness”
he stressed Walpole’s
implication that serendipity was a kind of innate gift or trait.
Walpole was also talking of serendipity as a kind of discovery.
The ambiguity
was never overcome and serendipity still indicates both a personal attribute
and an event or phenomenon
the word appeared in
all the “big” and medium-sized English and American dictionaries between 1909
and 1934.
authors reveal
disparities in definition
To avoid both the ambiguities of the meaning and the disappearance of one of
the meanings, Piotr Zielonka and I (2003) decided to translate serendipity into
Polish by using two different neologisms: “serendypizm” and “serendypicja” – to refer to the event and the personal
attribute respectively.
Even if
Merton waited four decades to publish his book on serendipity, he made wide use
of the concept in his theorizing.
It is
worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and
examining the sociological and philosophical implications of this idea.
“Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover
it.”
It is
true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not
laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said
that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of
science.
His attention to the concept of serendipity is the best evidence
Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the
elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of
scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the
results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)
“Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the
psychological source of an idea.
Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin,
Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity
has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)
Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity,
you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for
hares.
This descriptive model has many important
implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration
and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between
investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific
discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the
historian of science, but it raises further problems for research
administrators.
If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the
social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The
Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between
total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.
Whitney
supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking:
“Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt,
without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot
plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:
If scientists are determined
by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find
certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own
observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is
that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we
already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our
conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.
Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book about a word may surprise those who are not acquainted with Merton's work, but certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master. Searching, defining, and formulating concepts has always been Merton's main intellectual activity.
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