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Scientific Collaboration: Do Two Heads Need to Be More than Twice Better than One?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Thomas Boyer-Kassem  and
Cyrille Imbert
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Abstract

Epistemic accounts of scientific collaboration usually assume that, one way or another, two heads really are more than twice better than one. We show that this hypothesis is unduly strong. We present a deliberately crude model with unfavorable hypotheses. We show that, even then, when the priority rule is applied, large differences in successfulness can emerge from small differences in efficiency, with sometimes increasing marginal returns. We emphasize that success is sensitive to the structure of competing communities. Our results suggest that purely epistemic explanations of the efficiency of collaborations are less plausible but have much more powerful socioepistemic versions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 82 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 667 - 688
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the workshops Epistemic Groups and Collaborative Research in Science and Modeling Epistemic and Scientific Groups: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Nancy (France). We would like to thank the discussants for their helpful comments. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful reports. This work was supported by the MSH Lorraine (project Colexia); the Archives H. Poincaré, Université de Lorraine; and STL (UMR 8163, CNRS, and Université de Lille 1 and Lille 3, France).

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