Les ironies de (la) serendipity dans l’œuvre de Robert K. Merton

Temporalités

关键词: serendipity;    heuristic;    sociological semantics;    autobiography;    history of sociology;    sociology of knowledge;   

DOI  :  10.4000/temporalites.3480

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In what circumstances and why did Robert K. Merton hit up against the idea of serendipity? What place does it occupy in his work? This article proposes to retrace step by step the history of that encounter, which lacks neither irony nor piquant. In itself an example of serendipity, the accidental but ever so fruitful discovery of the word opened up many avenues that Merton was to follow in his research during the 1940s. The intriguing concept of the fortuitous discovery that – among other virtues – engender results of a nature to transform the theory promised to enrich and renew objective knowledge. But serendipity was more than a heuristic recipe to apply in science. For Merton, it was also the privileged and « self-exemplifying » object of a sociological semantics of concepts, whose ambition it is to study the itineraries of cultural terminologies. By retracing the birth of the research he carried out with Elinor Barber on the history of the word and on the sometimes volatile meanings of serendipity (a project that more or less ended in 1958 but was published only in 2002), we grasp why the theme held a doubly strategic interest for Merton, both epistemological and autobiographical. We can also understand why a new translation in French of the first fragment of article in which the sociologist conceptualized serendipity in 1948 was in itself a good example of the serendipity method.

【 授权许可】

Unknown