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A Sociology of Ownership

By Senior Copyright Counsel, Google Inc.

Robert King Merton died on February 23, 2003 at the age of 93. A man of great erudition and wit, he was born in Philadelphia on July 4, 1910 as Meyer R. Schkolnick to working class Jewish immigrants. His son Robert C. Merton won the Nobel prize for Economics in 1997. Meyer was a sociologist, and in 1957 became the President of the American Sociological Association; upon that occasion gave an address entitled "Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science, available here. (In 1980, the great mathematical statistician Stephen Stigler, himself the son of a Nobel laureate, wrote a highly amusing Festschrift contribution for Merton called "Stigler's Law of Eponymy," published more recently in a revised form in his 1999 book "Statistics on the Table." Sigler's Law of Eponymy is "No scientific discovery is named after the original discoverer," a self-referential pun completed by his attribution of the law to Merton. See wikipedia entry here on "Stigler's Law" and here for a list of eponymous laws).

Before reading Robert K's 1957 address this morning, I was familiar with his 1965 book (in the 1991 edition) "On the Shoulders of Giants." This book attempts to trace the aphorism, frequently and wrongly attributed to Issac Newton, that "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." I find Merton's book deeply annoying for its self-conscious effort to write in the style of Tristam Shandy, but I nevertheless did a blog on the issue in February 2006. What I didn't realize at the time of the blog, but now realize from reading the 1957 address, is how the book fits into Robert K's views on the sociology of ownership claims. In that address he argues that the many disputes over which scientist is the originator of a particular theory arises from the sociology of (at least modern) science, in which: "Recognition for originality becomes socially validated testimony that one has successfully lived up to the most exacting requirements of one's role as a scientist." (page 640). He argues that the disputes over who originated a scientific principle arises "from the institution of science, which defines originality as a supreme value and thereby makes recognition of one's originality a major concern."

This concern in turn is reflected in a reward system, one that includes eponymous laws, and more recently prizes. (See pages 642-645). But offset against this institutional push to show you are a giant and not a dwarf is a countervailing institutional norm, that of humility. As Merton puts it: "If the institution of science placed great value only on originality, scientists would perhaps attach even more importance to priority than they do. ...[But] the socially enforced value of humility [serves] to reduce the misbehavior of scientists below the rate that would occur if importance were assigned only to originality and the establishing of priority." (page 646). One form of humility is acknowledgment of one's "heavy debt" to one's predecessors, and it is here that the dwarf-giant aphorism comes into play, for Newton used it in a letter to Richard Hook, with whom he was then engaged in a priority dispute over the theory of colors. The usage of the metaphor was, therefore, false humility. Not everyone felt the need for such false humility. Merton gives the example of the late Harvard mathematician George Birkhoff, who upon receiving a letter from a Mexican mathematician expressing the hope that the U.S. would send to Mexico "savants of your stature," replied: "Professor Erro, in the States I am the only one of my stature." This led to obituary address for Birkhoff by Norbert Wiener that Birkhoff "was the first among us and he accepted that fact."

In any event, both the Merton and Stigler articles make another point, namely that the effort to determine who had priority, who was "original," is extremely difficult given the way manner in which we all build on each other, whether we are dwarfs or giants.

Full post as published by The Patry Copyright Blog on May 13, 2008 (boomark / email).