"Science is what scientists do"
About this Quote
A neat little tautology that quietly detonates a century of hand-wringing about what counts as "real" science. When Dennis Flanagan, an editor best known for shaping the public face of Scientific American, says "Science is what scientists do", he’s not being lazy; he’s being surgical. The line is a rebuke to armchair gatekeepers who want science to be a checklist of virtues (objectivity, falsifiability, neutrality) rather than a living practice carried out by fallible people inside institutions.
The intent is pragmatic: stop treating science like scripture and start treating it like labor. In five words, Flanagan shifts authority from abstract definitions to communities of expertise. That’s the subtext and the risk. If science is defined by the activity of scientists, then the boundaries of science are social boundaries: who gets to be called a scientist, which methods get funded, which questions get dignified as "research", whose data gets trusted. The statement exposes how much scientific legitimacy depends on credentialing, peer review, journals, and the editorial machinery that decides what becomes knowledge.
Context matters because Flanagan speaks from the thick of that machinery. Editors sit at the choke point between lab work and public meaning, watching how "science" is narrated, simplified, and weaponized. His tautology functions like a defense against ideological capture: don’t demand science deliver metaphysical certainty or moral purity. Demand that scientists do the work - messy, iterative, revisable - and judge it by how that work holds up over time, in public, under pressure.
The intent is pragmatic: stop treating science like scripture and start treating it like labor. In five words, Flanagan shifts authority from abstract definitions to communities of expertise. That’s the subtext and the risk. If science is defined by the activity of scientists, then the boundaries of science are social boundaries: who gets to be called a scientist, which methods get funded, which questions get dignified as "research", whose data gets trusted. The statement exposes how much scientific legitimacy depends on credentialing, peer review, journals, and the editorial machinery that decides what becomes knowledge.
Context matters because Flanagan speaks from the thick of that machinery. Editors sit at the choke point between lab work and public meaning, watching how "science" is narrated, simplified, and weaponized. His tautology functions like a defense against ideological capture: don’t demand science deliver metaphysical certainty or moral purity. Demand that scientists do the work - messy, iterative, revisable - and judge it by how that work holds up over time, in public, under pressure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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