Overview
- Brings together a critical philosophy of scientific progress and its consequences, with a critique of institutional dynamics of modern higher education
- Demonstrates how a number of fundamental debates in philosophy of science have important implications for issues in philosophy of higher education and higher education policy
- Yields a deeper insight into why academic economics is flawed and dangerous as an academic discipline
Part of the book series: Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives (DHEP, volume 9)
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Table of contents(14 chapters)
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Truth-Seeking and Scientific Progress
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The Dangers of Normal Science and Academic Consensus
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Incentives in Modern Higher Education and Their Distortionary Consequences
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Variation Across Contexts
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Conclusion
Keywords
- Incentive structures in higher education
- Pursuit of truth
- Academic inquiry
- Philosophy of economics
- Higher education policy
- Modern higher education
- Societal decisions
- Government policy
- Higher education system
- Academic economics
- Critiques of economics
- Scientific progress
- Normal science
- Status of economics
- Role of higher education
About this book
The core thesis of this book is that to understand the implications of incentive structures in modern higher education, we require a deeper understanding of associated issues in the philosophy of science.
Significant public and philanthropic resources are directed towards various forms of research in the hope of addressing key societal problems. That view, and the associated allocation of resources, relies on the assumption that academic research will tend towards finding truth – or at least selecting the best approximations of it. The present book builds on, and extends, contributions in philosophy and higher education to argue that this assumption is misplaced: with serious implications for modern higher education and its role in informing societal decisions and government policy.
The book develops a philosophical foundation for the analysis of the connection between higher education incentives, scientific progress and societal outcomes. That in turn is used to demonstrate how the current approach to incentivising intellectual and scientific progress is likely not only to fail, but in fact to cause harm on the very dimensions it purports to improve. The arguments presented are illustrated with examples from medicine and academic economics, making the book one of the first to examine issues of scientific progress and social consequences across the human and social sciences. In doing so, it develops a novel critique of modern economics that in turn provides a more philosophically substantive foundation for popular critiques of economics than has existed to date.
Reviews
“The topic of the book is highly relevant: the use of incentives to steer research towards progress. … The Incentivised University can be read as an analysis of the incentives and their detrimental effects on research, and it can be read as a debate book, an attempt to push these issues to the fore and to engage researchers, administrators, and policymakers.” (Kåre Letrud, Metascience, Vol. 31 (2), July, 2022)
Authors and Affiliations
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Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
Seán Mfundza Muller
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Incentivised University
Book Subtitle: Scientific Revolutions, Policies, Consequences
Authors: Seán Mfundza Muller
Series Title: Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84447-9
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Education, Education (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-84446-2Published: 25 January 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-84449-3Published: 26 January 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-84447-9Published: 24 January 2022
Series ISSN: 2366-2573
Series E-ISSN: 2366-2581
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 226
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Educational Philosophy, Philosophy of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences, multidisciplinary, Higher Education, Educational Policy and Politics