Serendipity – A sociological note

1. Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation
2004) is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book about a word may surprise those
who are not acquainted with Merton’s work, but certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master.
Searching, defining, and formulating concepts has always been Merton’s main intellectual activity.
2. Merton (1973: 8) used to repeat: “Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover
it.”

Merton and Barber do not fail to study and emphasize the social and historical context that permits the acceptance and
diffusion of the neologism. The nineteenth century is the century of industrial revolution. It is a period of extraordinary
expansion for science and technology, marked by the foundation of numerous new scientific disciplines, sociology included.
As the authors (2004: 46) remark: “It is in the nature of science that new concepts, facts, and instruments constantly emerge,
and there is a continual concomitant need for new terms to designate them. With the accelerated pace of scientific
development in the nineteenth century, the need for new terms was frequently felt and as frequently met by the construction
of neologisms. Scientists had no antipathy to new words as such: hundreds and then thousands were being coined…”

In 1909 the word is defined by The Century Dictionary as “the happy faculty or luck of finding by ‘accidental sagacity’”
or the “discovery of things unsought.”

Even if Merton waited four decades to publish his book on serendipity, he made wide use of the concept in his theorizing.
In 1946, Merton revealed his concept of the “serendipity pattern” in empirical research, of observing an unanticipated,
anomalous, and strategic datum, which becomes the occasion for developing a new theory. In this way Merton contributes
to the history he maps out.

It is worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and examining the sociological and
philosophical implications of this idea. In the 1930s, by facing the problems of the newly born discipline called the sociology
of knowledge, Merton works to eliminate some lacunas left by his predecessors. In a similar way to Ludwik Fleck (1979),
Merton is convinced that no reason impedes considering the so-called hard sciences as subject matter for the sociology of
knowledge. The sociology of knowledge cannot limit its subject matter to the historical, political and social sciences. This
is the frontier reached by Mannheim, but the American sociologist holds that it is necessary to go further. “Had Mannheim
systematically and explicitly clarified his position in this respect, he would have been less disposed to assume that the
physical sciences are wholly immune from extra-theoretical influences and, correlatively, less inclined to urge that the
social sciences are peculiarly subject to such influences” (Merton 1968: 552). Thanks to this new awareness, the sociology
of science came into existence. As Mario Bunge (1998: 232) remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by
training, is the real founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession; his predecessors had been
isolated scholars or amateurs.”

The authors also do not fail to present the resistance to the idea of serendipity. For orthodox Marxists, scientific and
technological discoveries are a product of necessity. The slavery mode of production does not need machines, while the
capitalistic mode of production needs them. Thus, the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century is related to the
development of physics and the invention of machinery. “To orthodox Marxists, the suggestion that discoveries could be
occasioned by accidents rather than by the inexorable development of the material base of society was anathema. Since the
Marxists believe that all social and physical phenomena are rigidly determined, inventions are, in principle, predictable,
and the job of the historian or philosopher of science is to work out ways of predicting them” (Merton and Barber 2004:
166). However, by using the adjective “orthodox”, the authors implicitly recognize that not all Marxists share this rigidly
deterministic view of social and natural reality.

Even if Merton did not publish his monographic work on serendipity until 2004, he has constantly referred to this category
in his theoretical work. In another writing, for instance, he makes the step from description to prescription:

historians and sociologists must both examine the various sorts of “failure”: intelligent errors and unintelligent
ones, noetically induced and organizationally induced foci of interest and blind spots of inquiry, promising leads
abandoned and garden-paths long explored, scientific contributions ignored or neglected by contemporaries and, to
draw the sampling to a close, they must examine not only cases of serendipity gained but of serendipity lost (as
with the many instances of the antibiotic effects of penicillin having been witnessed but not discovered). (Merton
1975: 9.)

The Baconian and positivist dream of elaborating a set of methodological rules capable of also opening the door to scientific
discovery to people of modest intelligence and sagacity cannot be better challenged than by the idea of serendipity.
Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar
cases, prove that serendipity has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164) emphasizes that: “Intuition, scriptures,
chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the psychological source of an idea. (Remember only Kekulé’s dream and
intuited imagery of the benzene ring which converted the idea of the mere number of atoms in a molecule into the structural
idea of their being arranged in a pattern resulting from the valences of different kinds of atoms.)” In this, Merton seems to
be very close to Bachelard, Popper, Bunge, and the neorationalists in general. Bachelard (1938), for example, emphasizes
the importance of abstraction as the only way to approach scientific truth. The Popperian idea that theories come from the
sky is well known. Finally, one of the most systematic studies of intuition in science has been proposed by Mario Bunge
(1962).

The serendipity pattern refers to the fairly common experience of observing an unanticipated, anomalous and
strategic datum which becomes the occasion for developing a new theory or for extending an existing theory…
The datum is, first of all, unanticipated. A research directed toward the test of one hypothesis yields a fortuitous
by-product, an unexpected observation which bears upon theories not in question when the research was begun.
Secondly, the observation is anomalous, surprising, either because it seems inconsistent with prevailing theory or
with other established facts. In either case, the seeming inconsistency provokes curiosity… And thirdly, in noting
that the unexpected fact must be strategic, i.e., that it must permit of implications which bear upon generalized
theory, we are, of course, referring rather to what the observer brings to the datum than to the datum itself. For it
obviously requires a theoretically sensitized observer to detect the universal in the particular. (Merton 1968: 157-
162.)

The peculiar thing about the serendipity pattern is that it weakens not only the Baconian, positivistic, inductivistic approach
to knowledge, but also the opposite sociologistic, constructivistic and relativistic temptation to see the content of scientific
theories as necessarily and fully determined by the social context. If scientists are determined by social factors (language,
conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own
observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is that the facts that we observe are not
necessarily contained in the theories we already know. Our faculty of observation is partlyindependent from our conceptual
apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.