Cultures of Trial and Error: Wissenschaftschmerz

JOTE x NanoBubbles present Cultures of Trial and Error: a peer reviewed blog series on error correction in science.

Something is rotten in the state of science. In its most generic form, this is the conclusion attached to the polycrisis in psychology and the life sciences by those who actively seek to reform how science is performed, published and evaluated. Self-tasked with the diagnosis of the ‘rot’, its mapping and its repair, is the community of meta-science (Field, 2022). Peterson and Panovsky (2023) have conceptualized metascience as a ‘scientific social movement’, drawing together scientific and activist dimensions under a single banner. This does not necessarily mean that there is only uniformity in the metascience community (Knibbe et al., 2025), but some shared characteristics and goals do keep the community together (Field, 2022). One of them is the profound dissatisfaction with the current state of science. The framing of that state is in terms of ‘rot’, or brokenness and connected to notions of fraud, sloppy science or irreplicability. It is accompanied by the perceived responsibility to “fix” science through, usually, strict policies, enhanced notions of rigor, commitment to transparency and a series of procedural innovations and technological platforms to support all of them. How do we understand metascience’s dissatisfaction and what does it fuel? To answer this question, I will ultimately draw from Fredric Jameson’s notion of “Nostalgia for the Present”.

The struggles of psychology and the life sciences are occasionally proclaimed as a polycrisis of science as a whole, even though Rubin (2023) qualifies this as a questionable metascience practice. Nevertheless, science exists at the intersection of publish-or-perish culture, the replication crisis (often recast into a credibility crisis, a crisis of confidence, or a theory crisis), the commercialization of research and even the threats to scientific freedom across the globe as universities are under siege by governments in, for instance, the US. Each and every one of these crises has placed increasing pressure on the modernist ideal. Modernism, in the intellectual and philosophical sense, is tied to belief in progress through universalist and dispassionate reason and empirical inquiry, to faith in the human capacity to shape and improve societies, and carries an emphasis on autonomy, often cast into terms of scientific freedom and independence.

In many ways, universities are microcosms of this modernist ideal: the pursuit of truth and progress through free and disciplined inquiry. They are both a product of and a vehicle for modernism (and a lot more). However, the modernist ideal is under pressure from all sides and it produces, especially in and among scientists a deep melancholia; a sense of loss, or the fear of losing something many scientists struggle to put into words: the fear of losing modernist ideals, beliefs and aspirations. Metascience can be read as the operationalization of that melancholia, providing both substance to the loss, and as a form of resistance to the crumbling of the modern ideal.

Metascience and the modernist ideal

The modernist ideal for science is contested though. If anything, it is both aspirational and nostalgic. Merton’s codification of the ethos of science under the banner of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness and organized skepticism (CUDOS) knows, for instance, at least three sets of competitors which each carry within them, a diagnosis of the state of science. Where the Mertonian norms reflect modernist ideals –objectivity, rational critique, and (near-)universal values, Mitroff’s work on counter-norms in the Apollo project show how the local social, political and economic realities find their way into the conduct of scientists and their motivations (Mitroff, 1974). The normative structure of science was a lot like the normative order ‘outside’ of science. The production of certified knowledge was, it turns out, social and political through and through. Ziman (1996) followed Mitroff in the development of the post-academic PLACE norms (Proprietary, Local, Authoritarian, Commissioned, Expert), further embodying the postmodern skepticism toward the grand narratives and ideals of modernity.

Whereas Merton's norms approach an idealized, modernist vision of science, Mitroff’s and Ziman’s norms describe a postmodern vision of science as embedded in institutions, societies, markets, and power structures. From the perspective of most scholars of science beyond metascience, this does not necessarily translate into some form of decline for science, but merely a form of demystification of science. However, this is not a shared diagnosis. In fact, after CUDOS and PLACE, MacFarlane (2024) coined the DECAY norms for science (Differentialism, Egoism, Capitalism, Advocacy). In many ways, the DECAY norms seem modelled after Mitroff’s counter-norms. Where Mitroff offered an expansion of the normative structures of science, offering suggestions that science has either shifted away from a state of modernity, or perhaps that such a state never existed (Latour, 1993), MacFarlane (who does not cite Mitroff at all), frames this very actively as decline and decay of the liberal virtues that Merton’s norms embodied.

While metascience is a diverse community, this framing of decay resonates with a large part of it. In fact, in the opening chapter of the Handbook of Meta-Research, Derrick et al. (2024) write that the label of metascience “was adopted, in particular, by a collection of defining pieces of work referring to a crisis of reproducibility in science and the rise of the recognition of academic misconduct” (p. 3), suggesting that to some in the metascience community, the decline of science is part of its foundational identity. This decline allows us to connect the metascience’s active scandalization that there is a social and political dimension to scientific systems that influences how they operate and what they produce (Hesselmann & Reinhart, 2024; Penders, 2024b) to the realization that the modernist ideal for science is slipping from our hands, at risk of being lost.

However, metascience offers a dual affective state. Next to its melancholia, there is sanguinity, optimism and hope – the hope for a return to modernity. Importantly, though, that return is not a return to the past. Instead, it is deeply future-oriented and rooted in innovations meant to strengthen the scientific process that were technologically impossible in the past, improving upon it along the way. The flexibility of digital publication trajectories allows procedural innovations such as registered report-based publication (Nosek & Lakens, 2014) in which research design and methodology are temporally disconnected from experimentation or data collection. The digital infrastructures available to scientists nowadays allow for digital lab notebooks, open methods, open data, and the sharing of materials, procedures and data to an extent that was impossible only a few decades ago. Innovations also extend into new organizational forms for designing research and research consortia (Doell, 2023; Penders, 2024a). Entire new communities, expertises and job descriptions have been built along the way (Nelson, 2020). Metascience and scientific reform seek to innovate their way back into modernity, one fix at a time.

Nostalgia for the present

How can we understand the coexistence of metascience’s foundational melancholia and its sociotechnical sanguinity? When Nosek et al write that with the aid of metascience, they seek to return science to ‘the simplified model of research taught in elementary school’ (2018, p.2602), they invoke images of an idealized past in which science was simpler, purer, more objective. The paper in which Nosek et al. invoke this image is not nostalgic in the traditional sense though: it seeks to promote action in the present. The paradox metascience brings forward is best caught in Fredric Jameson’s notion of a “Nostalgia for the Present” (1989), the paradoxical situation that even though we are in the present, we experience a sense that the present itself has been lost or fragmented and seek to return to a stabilized present which we can grasp and understand. Or, in more romantic terms, we are painfully experiencing a mismatch between science as it is, fragmented, imperfect, error-prone and in need of repair, and science as it could be in the here and now: objective, transparent, rigorous, self-correcting and trustworthy: Wissenschaftschmerz.

Under the banner of a “Nostalgia for the Present”, we can see how the melancholia that comes with Wissenschaftschmerz is fuel for the innovations that metascience offers and that the sanguinity of metascience is part of its modernist project. Metascience is all about the present and the future, about repairing the loss of a science that does not exist in the here and now, and about reaching for a science that can fulfil the expectations of the mind. As such, metascience is both a progressive, forward-looking endeavor: seeking to build new structures for scientific practice that address contemporary challenges; and an endeavor that wields reactionary nostalgia for the present: longing for a scientific present that is no longer alienated from its own ideals, and in need of repair.

Jameson (2016) developed his thinking on nostalgia through his critical work on postmodernism in literary critique. To him, it is tied to the rise of consumerism in late capitalism, where perceptions of the past and present can be sold as commodities in the present and future. Metascience has excelled at this, at selling its modernist project and a social scientific movement of hope, bundling imaginaries of decay and repair, as a cure to our Wissenschaftschmerz.

This blog post series has been financially supported by 'NanoBubbles: how, when and why does science fail to correct itself', a project that has received Synergy grant funding from the European Research Council (ERC), within the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, grant agreement no. 951393.

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