An inferentialist conception regarding the co-authorship of scientific papers

Abstract

Co-authorship is very common in most areas of science and has grown as the complexity of research has increased the need for scientific collaboration. But plural authorship tends to complicate the attribution of merit to individual scientists, which is the basis of scientific evaluation. I argue that collaboration does not necessarily entail co-authorship, though in many cases the latter is an option that the individual scientists might not choose, at least in principle: individually authors might separately publish their own contribution to a collaborative project in which they had taken part, or papers could explicitly state what contribution each individual author had made. I ask, hence, why it is that scientists prefer to ‘pool’ their contributions instead of keeping them separate if they are pursuing, amongst other things, individual recognition. My answer, following an inferentialist approach to scientific knowledge, is based on the view of the scientific paper as a piece of argumentation rather than as a piece of knowledge.