Is the scientific paper a fraud?

Abstract

Abstract I have chosen for my title a question: Is the scientific paper a fraud? I ought to explain that a scientific ‘paper’ is a printed communication to a learned journal, and scientists make their work known almost wholly through papers and not through books, so papers are very important in scientific communication. As to what I mean by asking ‘is the scientific paper a fraud?’-I do not of course mean ‘does the scientific paper misrepresent facts’, and I do not mean that the interpretations you find in a scientific paper are wrong or deliberately mistaken. I mean the scientific paper may be a fraud because it misrepresents the processes of thought that accompanied or gave rise to the work that is de scribed in the paper. That is the question, and I will say right away that my answer to it is ‘yes’. The scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific thought.

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