Cultures of Trial and Error: Wissenschaftschmerz

Something is rotten in the state of science. In its most generic form, this is the conclusion attached to the polycrisis in psychology and the life sciences by those who actively seek to reform how science is performed, published and evaluated. Self-tasked with the diagnosis of the ‘rot’, its mapping and its repair, is the community of meta-science (Field, 2022). Peterson and Panovsky (2023) have conceptualized metascience as a ‘scientific social movement’, drawing together scientific and activist dimensions under a single banner. This does not necessarily mean that there is only uniformity in the metascience community (Knibbe et al., 2025), but some shared characteristics and goals do keep the community together (Field, 2022). One of them is the profound dissatisfaction with the current state of science. The framing of that state is in terms of ‘rot’, or brokenness and connected to notions of fraud, sloppy science or irreplicability. It is accompanied by the perceived responsibility to “fix” science through, usually, strict policies, enhanced notions of rigor, commitment to transparency and a series of procedural innovations and technological platforms to support all of them. How do we understand metascience’s dissatisfaction and what does it fuel? To answer this question, I will ultimately draw from Fredric Jameson’s notion of “Nostalgia for the Present”.