![]() Science educators state that messiness should be foregrounded in science teaching (Metz 2014, 2005 Turner and Khalilah Shamsid-Deen 2005). Mess even appears as a lemma in scientific encyclopedias (Ferrales 2020). There are blogs and articles discussing messy science (Aschwanden 2015 Gould et al. ![]() ![]() John Law’s After Method: Mess in Social Science Research ( 2004) calls for new research methodologies better to accommodate a messy world. In books like Helga Nowotny’s An Orderly Mess ( 2017), messiness is described as the new background condition of science, society, and our personal lives. Nowadays, we often hear, or read, about “mess” or “messiness” in science. They are urgent and need to be addressed before sufficient evidence is in. Wicked problems cut across different disciplines, engage different stakeholders (including non-scientists), are fluid, and cannot even be clearly formulated. These older analyses can illuminate important characteristics of today’s scientific problems. “Mess” and “wicked problems” were a theme in operations research and theories of social planning in the 1970s. It also shows that we do not need an entirely new conceptual inventory to analyze these problems. Part II identifies one way in which it is enlightening to think about mess in current science, namely in reference to the problems that scientists need to address. In the paper, I refer to this as “messy science talk.” Second, Part I draws out rhetorical functions of messy science talk, namely the denigration of science in the popular media and the celebration of the maverick. This paper discusses the claim that science is “messy.” Part I argues first, that a good portion of today’s discussions about messy science is just a portrayal of familiar features of science in new terms.
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