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In a series of papers (Zamora Bonilla 1999, 2002a, 2006a, b, c; Ferreira and Zamora Bonilla 2006). I have been defending an economic, game-theoretic approach to the understanding of the social construction of scientific knowledge; such an approach would complement the traditional efforts in using insights and techniques from other social sciences (esp. sociology and anthropology) to the idiosyncratic epistemic aspects of science, but would also have two fundamental virtues from a "rationalist" point of view: in the first place, the game-theoretic, rational-choice approach allows to model in an explicit way the factors determining the scientists' decisions, as well as the interdependences between them, without dressing all this in a mystifying rhetoric which tends to obscure the analysis more than to illuminate it (many will say that the economic jargon can be no less mystifying and obscurantist than the Foucauldian one so often employed in post-modern studies of science, but the difficulty of rational-choice analysis is of the same kind as that of mathematics and logic: it serves, when used properly, the goal of making the inferential links of our reasoning explicit and subject to criticism); secondly, instead of launching a non-contestable accusation of lack of objectivity and rationality to the products and methods of scientific research, economic models allow to clearly see what are the specific shortcomings of certain ways research can be carried out (i.e., they permit us to identify specific inefficiencies), and point towards those changes in the modelled situations that would effectively improve the results that scientists are getting. Stated in other words, a game theoretic analysis of the social construction of scientific knowledge allows us not to renounce to the thesis that science is a pretty good method of finding out objective and significant truths about the world, nor to the claim that science is the product of typically human and social forces, nor to the goal of discovering the possible shortcomings of science and, more importantly, of discovering also some ways of overcoming them. I think the focus on the necessary formalisms I had to use in the papers quoted at the beginning may have precluded these virtues being well appreciated enough, so I would like to take this opportunity to state them in a clearer way.

DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-3263-8_28

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