CONCEPT
The Moral Economy of Science
Daston's foundational concept for the system of affect, trust, and obligation that governs knowledge-producing communities — the social infrastructure without which scientific claims cannot be reliably evaluated.
In her 1995 essay 'The Moral Economy of Science,' Daston argued that scientific knowledge is sustained not only by evidentiary standards and logical argument but by a specific moral economy — a system of norms, affects, and obligations that govern how scientists relate to one another, to their objects of study, and to the communities that rely on their work. Trust in scientific claims is never based solely on the content of those claims; it rests on a web of social, institutional, and material signals that together constitute the evidentiary infrastructure of a knowledge-producing community. The author's affiliation, the journal's reputation, the rigor of peer review, the reproducibility of results, the coherence with established knowledge — all contribute to credibility, and none is reducible to the claim's content alone.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept extends historian E.P. Thompson's earlier use of 'moral economy' to describe the normative expectations of eighteenth-century crowds. Daston's innovation was to