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Is science a 'market of ideas'? Not according to the economics of science. Science is competitive, but scientific competition is not market competition. Nor is scientific competition the same as competition between universities. Scientific competition is, first of all, competition between individual scientists. Current science policies shift the boundary between scientific competition, where scientists provide public goods in the hope to acquire status among their peers, and market competition in science, where the results of research are private property protected by patents or other means, in favor of the market. However, the economic ring of the political slogans cannot conceal a serious lack of understanding of scientific competition behind the reform proposals.

Abstract
This paper considers critical rationalism under an institutional perspective. It argues that a methodology must be incentive compatible in order to prevail in scientific competition. As shown by a formal game-theoretic model of scientific competition, incentive compatibility requires quality standards that are hereditary: using high-quality research as an input must increase a researcher's chances to produce high-quality output. Critical rationalism is incentive compatible because of the way it deals with the Duhem-Quine problem. An example from experimental economics illustrates the relevance of the arguments.

In the summer of 2008, the Spanish legislature resolved to grant great apes (though not all simians) basic human rights. While the decision to grant such rights came about largely through the lobbying efforts of the Great Ape Project (GAP), the decision has potential reverberations throughout the scientific world and beyond in its implications for shaping determinations of "what is human." Such implications do not appear to be lost on various groupings of scientists who have spoken about their opinions about the case and the project in general. These groupings of scientists, I argue, using the work of Mary Douglas and others, can be compared to "tribes" actively advancing and defending their classifications of the "human" in a bid for a retention or expansion of power.

Introduction. The article is devoted to the problems of testing the live poliomyelitis vaccine that took place in the 1950s in the USSR. The problems of the trials have again become topical because of the pandemic of the novel coronavirus. Methods and materials. Using narrative and historical-comparative methods to analyze materials from the archives of the USSR Ministry of Health Care and the digitized archive of the American virologist A. Sabin, the author of the article looked into some problems related to the trials of the live polio vaccine. Analysis. As a result of the analysis of historical sources, the following problems of trials were found out: high risks of mass use of the live vaccine; lack of agreement between scientists and medical officials on the possibility and necessity of testing; difficulties in relations between an organizer of the tests (M. Chumakov) and some officials from the Ministry of Health Care of the RSFSR; the problems in Soviet-American relations which affected the scientific cooperation; difficult relations between the Soviet organizers of the tests (M. Chumakov and A. Smorodintsev); troubles that arose in relations between A. Sabin and A. Smorodintsev in connection with the politicization of the vaccination issue; ethical challenges of human trials. Results. The USSR took huge risks during the mass trials of the live polio vaccine, which was Soviet science and population significant contribution to the world fight against poliomyelitis. Mass trials took place in the USSR during the Cold War, which, however, did not become an obstacle to scientific cooperation between the USSR and the USA in this sphere. The success of the polio vaccine trials was used by the Soviet state to increase its prestige. At some points, representatives of the Soviet state and media even "forgot" that the vaccine was developed in American virology laboratories, calling Soviet organizers of vaccine trials its developers. Ethical norms of experiments on humans in the 1950–1960s were just being formed, so some of them could be called violations by modern standards. However, the success of the tests closed the question of those violations.

Prior research about the interaction between private firms and the scientific community has largely viewed firms' articles in scientific publications as a means to improve research and development productivity—by encouraging their researchers to publish scientific papers, firms can maintain linkages with the scientific community, attract talent, and access external knowledge on which they can build to create innovations. This paper, in contrast, emphasizes the role of scientific publications in firms' battles for market dominance and examines how competitive conditions shape firms' propensities to publish scientific articles about their innovations. Focusing on the context of pharmaceutical drugs, we develop propositions about how the competition that one drug faces from similar drugs and potential substitutes influences the innovating firm's inclination to publish articles in the top medical journals about that drug to facilitate its assessment by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the medical community. We also propose that scientific articles about competing drugs compel a firm to highlight its own drug in scientific papers to assert the drug's uniqueness and mitigate the threat of substitution. Whereas prior research has elucidated how science contributes to enhancing firms' competence at creating innovations, which is critical to their ability to compete in technology-intensive environments, this paper draws attention to how competition, in turn, permeates into the scientific arena, creating inducements for firms to use scientific publications to position their innovations in the marketplace.

What is the relative importance of structural versus contextual forces in the birth and death of scientific theories? We describe a formal dynamic model of the birth, evolution, and death of scientific paradigms based on Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The model represents scientific activity as a changing set of coupled institutions; a simulated ecology of interacting paradigms in which the creation of new theories is stochastic and endogenous. The model captures the sociological dynamics of paradigms as they compete against one another for members, solve puzzles, and recognize anomalies. We use sensitivity tests and regression to examine the role of intrinsic versus contextual factors in determining paradigm success. We find that situational factors attending the birth of a paradigm largely determine its probability of rising to dominance, while the intrinsic explanatory power of a paradigm is only weakly related to the likelihood of success. For those paradigms surviving the emergence phase, greater explanatory power is significantly related to longevity. However, the relationship between a paradigm's "strength" and the duration of normal science is also contingent on the competitive environment during the emergence phase. Analysis of the model shows the dynamics of competition and succession among paradigms to be conditioned by many positive feedback loops. These self-reinforcing processes amplify intrinsically unobservable microlevel perturbations in the environment—the local conditions of science, society, and self faced by the creators of a new theory—until they reach macroscopic significance. Such path dependent dynamics are the hallmark of self-organizing evolutionary systems. We consider the implications of these results for the rise and fall of new ideas in contexts outside the natural sciences such as management fads.

Modern science is, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his fundamental work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a science that develops in stages: "scientific revolution" – "nor­mal science" – "scientific revolution". During periods of normal functioning of science, the rules of testing and testing show established and perceived without reflection para­digms, but in the case of technical disciplines, this rule does not work, since technical paradigms do not change according to the same rules as other scientific paradigms. To change technical paradigms, you only need to accept them by the expert community – you also need to accept them by technical consumers. The article discusses the difficul­ties of defining the concepts of "technology" and "technical knowledge" as knowledge about artifacts, their use and the consequences of their use (Bernhard Irrgang). On two examples of the control of technical paradigms in two totalitarian regimes of the twenti­eth century (Lysenkoism, or Lysenkovshchina and "Aryan physics"), the role of para­digms in the situation of ideological control is presented. In these cases, we used at­tempts to "correct" genetics and quantum physics (more precisely, to completely abandon it), respectively. Of course, this control brought biology in the Soviet Union and physics in Nazi Germany to the brink of disaster. In this article, with the help of Gisle Solbu's theory of epi-knowing (knowledge at the general educational level), we propose solutions to the problem of purposeful ideological interference in the scientific and ideo­logical adjustments of not only scientific paradigms, but also scientific paradigms.