I «pesci», il «pavone» e l’‘arte’ di ‘valutare’ la ‘qualità’ della ricerca scientifica

Abstract

Being in service of the meritocratic dogma, the evaluative liturgy is by now so deep-rooted that often we cannot really appreciate how and how much the freedom of science and teaching is reduced and altered by those rituals. The new public management techniques for the ‘assessment’ of the research ‘quality’, based on a naive, childish trust in the objectivity of numbers, of numerical aims and indexes, make it impossible to discuss quality in qualitative terms. Only what can be numbered, standardized is considered scientific. What cannot be understood in these terms is considered irrelevant and so expelled from the scope of what is scientifically knowable. These way we cannot know just that qualitative nuance, that decisive «almost-nothing» which makes it incomparable, inimitable, irreplaceable, unclassifiable a person or a thing, a process or a product, an event or a phenomenon.