Seminar
Metascience of Past, Present, & Future
- Nathanael Sheehan
- Date
- Friday 7 November 2025
- Time
- Series
- CWTS Research Seminars
- Location
-
Willem Einthoven
Kolffpad 1
2333 BN Leiden - Room
- Online & Common rooms, CWTS
Abstract of seminar
This talk traces the trajectory of metascience from its origins in the Unity of Science movement to its contemporary form as an empirical reform project. I argue that while its methods and objects have changed from logical reconstruction to data analytics and methodological audits; the underlying ambition remains the same: that science might come to understand itself. What began as a philosophical search for unity has evolved into an institutional pursuit of credibility. Yet the ideal of unity persists, re-emerging in new guises through the infrastructures, collaborations, and reflexive practices of modern research. Drawing on pluralist perspectives from the disunity debates, I suggest that today’s metascience does not abandon the unity of science but reimagines it as a distributed and dynamic ecology of reflexivity rather than a single system of reason.