Robert K. Merton, Cudos and Magical Thinking in the Age of Covid

ABSTRACT

The ongoing efforts to explain the disease COVID-19 and the parallel efforts to devise and implement public health measures that mitigate it, are an opportunity to reconsider the values of science as identified to Merton. What is revealed is that science is always partial and always tentative. This leaves much scope for magical thinking and for flat science denial. © The Author(s) 2023.