1.3. The Revenge of the Nobel

Hack: Autumn 2018, Moscow, Merck Conference

In the hall of a Moscow conference dedicated to the 120th anniversary of Merck's operations in Russia, scientists, researchers, and representatives of the pharmaceutical industry gathered. Among the invited guests was Nobel laureate in chemistry Arieh Warshel, whose work on computer modelling of biological systems opened a new era in computational chemistry.
Warshel steps up to the podium. Journalists expect the usual fare for such events — thanks to the organisers, a popularised retelling of his research, predictions about the future of science. Instead, the scientist utters words that, within days, will circulate through scientific and para-scientific publications, provoking a wave of commentary, debate, and — for many — silent agreement.
"The system of scientific publications is based on the subjective approach of editors and reviewers. If you work in an innovative field, leading journals may question your results. For example, my early works were rejected by Nature and Science. The peer review system in journals is similar to any political system in which personal interests are prioritised. It is difficult to assess at any given moment what the effect of a young author's paper might be. Therefore, I am opposed to this kind of quantitative performance metrics; a more comprehensive approach is necessary. A scientist's frequent publications in top journals say more about his adherence to the journal's editorial policy than about the quality of the science."
The hall falls silent. A Nobel laureate, a man who has reached the summit of the scientific Olympus, publicly calls into question the legitimacy of the very system that established and maintains that Olympus. The journals that refused to publish his early work now beg him for collaboration. The system that once rejected him is now forced to admit: it was wrong.
But Warshel goes beyond a mere statement of fact. He does not simply remind us that he was rejected — he problematises the very mechanism of producing scientific legitimacy. The peer review system, he says, "is similar to any political system in which personal interests are prioritised." Impact factors, citation indices, journal rankings — all of these do not so much measure the quality of science as reproduce power relations within the scientific community.
This moment — the moment when a person who has received the highest recognition from the system refuses to recognise the legitimacy of the criteria of that recognition — merits philosophical analysis. This is not merely the grievance of a rejected author receiving belated satisfaction. This is a symptom of a systemic crisis. A crisis in which form and content, reputation and truth, citation index and scientific discovery enter into a relationship that threatens the very meaning of scientific inquiry.
The point is not that truth disappears or that science is reduced to a game of statuses. Truth is not abolished by representations. But it is representations that determine which fragments of reality have a chance to be heard and which dissolve into noise. They do not create the being of science, but they redistribute its visibility and its force.
In a 2019 interview with Kommersant, Warshel mentions another consequence of the Nobel Prize, beyond the obvious ones: "Now specialists are afraid to approach me with questions at conferences because of my status. It is sad that this distance has arisen; I try to dispel this prejudice."
Paradox: the highest scientific recognition, which should open new possibilities for dialogue and collaboration, in practice creates a distance, a barrier, a zone of silence.
Here we encounter two symptoms requiring philosophical reflection. The first is the gap between formal criteria of scientific success and the real content of scientific work. The second is the effect of "status distance," when formal recognition paradoxically impedes that very communication which constitutes the essence of the scientific community.

Scientometrics as Representation: Toward an Epistemology of Crisis

A philosophically responsible analysis of the symptoms manifested in the Warshel case requires a conceptual apparatus capable of exposing the structure of the crisis, rather than limiting itself to its empirical description. Such an apparatus is provided by the contemporary debate on the crisis of scientific representations. As V.A. Kupriyanov and L.V. Shipovalova convincingly show, representations in scientific cognition perform not merely a service function but a constitutive one. They are not neutral intermediaries between the researcher and reality. On the contrary, representations construct scientific objectivity; they legitimate knowledge, endowing it with the status of reliability (as distinct from opinion); and finally, they serve as the "assembly point" of the scientific community, an instrument for the formation of the knowing subject (Kupriyanov & Shipovalova, 2017: 173).
The crisis of representation occurs when the medial status of representation — its role as intermediary — is lost. Representation ceases to be a transparent window onto reality and becomes an opaque screen, obscuring what it should reveal. What occurs is what Lorraine Daston calls the "hypostatisation of representation": the means of knowing is mistaken for its end, the map is equated with the territory (Daston, 2004: 102). In the case of scientometrics, this crisis acquires a specific sharpness. Scientometrics, originally arising as a navigation tool within the ever-growing corpus of texts, as a service for the scientific community itself (Price, 1963: 34), underwent an inversion of ends and means. Quantitative indicators — impact factor, Hirsch index, journal rankings — turned from conditional and approximate markers of scientific quality into its substitute. The representation of scientific activity replaced the activity itself.
This substitution, however, does not mean that scientific work itself ceases to exist. Experiments, calculations, laboratories, material processes remain. What changes is merely which of them receive the institutional right to be recognised as "science." In other words, it is not the substrate that is transformed, but the order of admission.
This process of substitution was brilliantly described already by Robert Merton in his concept of the "Matthew effect," which he considered a fundamental feature of stratification in science. Merton showed that the system of reward and recognition operates on the principle of cumulative advantage: recognition generates further recognition, citation generates further citation, without direct connection to the real content and contribution of the work (Merton, 1968: 56-57). Scientometrics, intended to measure influence objectively, in practice merely registers and legitimises these power asymmetries, transforming them into "objective data."
The Warshel case is an ideal illustration of this mechanism. His early innovative works were rejected by Nature and Science not because their scientific content was deemed unsound, but because they did not fit into the existing representational order. The status of the author (a young scientist, not yet possessing the necessary symbolic capital) and the status of the knowledge itself (too innovative to be immediately recognised) entered into contradiction with the institutional criteria of selection. Representation (the absence of prestigious publications in the past, age) replaced the represented (the potential significance of the research).
Here again, a general principle manifests itself: the order of evaluation begins to function autonomously from that which it is meant to evaluate. The metric ceases to measure and begins to select. It does not reflect the reality of science but intervenes in its distribution.
The paradox, however, lies in the fact that it was precisely this system, which had rejected him, that subsequently appropriated his success. The Nobel Prize became an act of "symbolic absorption": the system recognised Warshel, but only after he had proved his worth according to its own (if belated) rules.

From Positivist Utopia to Constructive Realism

Criticism of scientometrics is often polarised into two camps: apologists for the quantitative approach, who see in it a panacea for managerial inefficiency, and its conservative opponents, who see in it an instrument of bureaucratic violence against the living tissue of scientific creativity. This binary optics, however, masks a deeper epistemological problem.
As Alireza Manghani convincingly shows, an adequate understanding of the crisis of scientometrics, particularly in the humanities, requires overcoming the positivist tradition that dominated the philosophy of science for decades. Positivism proceeded from the assumption that science can be adequately described as a set of true statements. The non-positivist approach, by contrast, considers science as based on the research practices of the scientific community, on shared norms and values — on what Thomas Kuhn called a "paradigm" (Manghani, 2015: 214-216). Scientific knowledge here is rooted in concrete practices, in the "lifeworld" of researchers (Pruzhinin, 2009: 78).
From this perspective, the crisis of scientometrics is a crisis of reduction: the attempt to reduce the richness of research practices to a few quantitative indicators inevitably leads to the loss of that very content which these indicators are meant to measure. Warshel, in his critique, hits precisely this point when he asserts that the peer review system "is similar to any political system in which personal interests are prioritised." The epistemological subtext of this statement is important. "Personal interests" should be understood not in a narrowly corrupt sense, but in the sense that Pierre Bourdieu brought to the analysis of the scientific field. The scientific field is a field of struggle for "symbolic capital," for the monopoly over "scientific competence" as the power to speak in the name of science, to determine what is a scientific fact and what is a marginal error (Bourdieu, 1975: 32-35). Publication in a top journal is not merely communication; it is an act of investing in symbolic capital and simultaneously an act of its legitimation.
When Warshel declares that frequent publications in top journals speak not of the quality of science but of adherence to editorial policy, he exposes the mechanism of production of this legitimacy. Success in the scientific field requires not only the production of truth but also the reproduction of the rules of the game established by its dominant institutions. The Warshel case is doubly interesting because he belongs to the natural sciences. If even here, in an area seemingly most amenable to quantitative evaluation, the system fails, rejecting future Nobel discoveries, then the problem lies not in the specificity of disciplines but in the very principle of scientometric representation.

The Dialectic of Recognition and Alienation

The second symptom identified in Warshel's interview — the effect of "status distance" — requires a separate philosophical analysis that goes beyond the sociology of science and has its roots in the classical philosophical tradition. The Nobel Prize, as the highest form of institutional recognition, produces a paradoxical effect of isolation. The laureate finds himself not at the centre of communication but in its vacuum. Colleagues, in his words, "are afraid to approach me with questions at conferences because of my status."
This phenomenon can be interpreted through the lens of the Hegelian dialectic of master and servant. The path to recognition, as Hegel describes it in the Phenomenology of Spirit, is a path to domination. Consciousness seeks to be recognised by another consciousness, but in this striving lies a contradiction: authentic recognition can only come from an equal, from a free consciousness. The master, having achieved recognition from the servile consciousness, receives not authentic recognition but merely a confirmation of his domination, which is empty because it comes from one whose consciousness is not independent (Hegel, 1977: 111-119). The status of laureate transforms the scientist into a figure of the Master in the scientific field. Colleagues who fear to approach and ask a question recognise his greatness, but this recognition has no value for living scientific dialogue, for it comes not from equals but from "subordinates" whose fear of status blocks the possibility of authentic discussion.
In Bourdieu's terms, one could say that the symbolic capital accumulated by the laureate reaches such a critical mass that it begins to distort the social field around itself. The distance of which Warshel speaks is nothing other than the result of the objective structure of the field, in which the enormous concentration of capital at one pole makes symmetric exchange with other agents impossible (Bourdieu, 1975: 67). The laureate ceases to be merely a researcher and becomes a symbol, a "walking representation" of Science as such. And here we encounter another turn of the crisis of representation: the living scientist is replaced by his own reputation, his own symbolic image. He is alienated from himself by his status. Communication becomes ritualised, questions become signs of deference, discussion gives way to monologue.

Toward an Epistemology of Resistance

If in the previous chapter we saw how language, detached from reference, begins to produce effects, here we encounter a different but structurally similar phenomenon: the order of evaluation detaches from content and begins to live its own life. In both cases, we are dealing not with the disappearance of reality but with the autonomisation of order. Being shifts to where the structure is held, not to where the "thing in itself" is located.
The Warshel case thus exposes the structure of a fundamental conflict that remains a subject of intense debate in contemporary philosophy of science: the conflict between formal mechanisms for evaluating scientific activity and the real content of scientific inquiry. This tension between an order striving for unification, standardisation, the creation of uniform, transparent, supposedly objective criteria of evaluation — and a force that resists this unification, escapes formalisation, and maintains connection with the living tissue of research practices, with tacit knowledge.
This tension cannot be finally resolved. It cannot be "sublated" by a complete formalisation of scientific activity — for formalisation kills that very creativity it is meant to evaluate. Neither can it be "sublated" by the abandonment of all formal criteria — for in the absence of criteria, the scientific community loses its capacity for self-regulation and becomes vulnerable to external, even cruder forms of control. The task, therefore, lies not in resolution but in the holding of this tension. In holding it in a mode of constant reflection on what exactly we are measuring and for what purpose.
In this sense, Warshel's position can be understood as a practical realisation of what might be called "constructive realism" — an epistemological stance that recognises the reality of scientific inquiry while simultaneously being aware that our ways of representing it are always incomplete, always mediated by social and institutional factors, and always require critical reflection. When he refuses to judge Chinese applicants on the basis of holding a degree because "almost all applicants from China have scientific degrees, which can be misleading," Warshel demonstrates precisely such holding. The formal criterion is not discarded, but neither is it taken as absolute; it is placed in context, correlated with other criteria, tested by personal interview.
When, in 2016, together with a hundred other Nobel laureates, he signed a letter in defence of GMOs, Warshel acknowledged: "Unfortunately, I do not fully believe in the power of petitions. Those in power have no reason to listen to the voice of scientists." This acknowledgement of his own powerlessness in the face of political authority closes the circle of our analysis. Scientific authority, even in its highest form, does not guarantee influence on reality. The symbolic capital of science is converted into political capital only with difficulty. But it is precisely here that the true task of the philosophy of science is revealed: not to serve the system of formal evaluation and not naively to oppose to it a romantic image of the solitary genius, but constantly to remind us of opacity, of irremovable complexity, of the principled incompleteness of all representations. In this reminder lies the condition of possibility for science as a living, creative, human enterprise.