Today I was reading up no Stigler’s Law. As you may know, Stigler’s Law states that “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”
If you are even tangentially involved with science, you know that this is true. Even Stigler’s Law is not named after its original discoverer.
Stigler himself attributes Stigler’s Law to Robert Merton. Yet there is plenty of evidence that others had said it before Merton did.
Still, I was curious about Robert Merton, so I ended up reading all about him on Wikipedia. Merton was completely fascinating.
A founding father of modern sociology, he coined the terms “unintended consequences”, “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophecy”. Simply by reading that article, I learned about middle-range theory, cultural strain, empirical functional analysis, latent dysfunction, theory of deviance, sociology of science and many other fascinating topics.
So as an unintended consequence of being curious about one thing, I ended up learning a lot about a different thing. What I learned doesn’t make me a sociologist by any stretch of the imagination, but it might turn out to be useful at parties.
Regarding Stigler’s original/non-original assertion, I like the much earlier version supposedly coined by Alfred North Whitehead: “Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.”
But somebody else probably said that first.