ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have shown how the two traits which inform modern science, namely, “technicization” and “societization”, play out in the counter-scientific, “menace-threatening” mechanisms of the Evaluation Machinery. This chapter focuses on the role played by anonymity in the functioning of those mechanisms. A consideration about the essential purpose of scientific publishing, and about what has become of “the public use of reason” in today’s academic reality, lays the foundation for the subsequent analysis of the scope of anonymously delivered assessments and the interrogation of their justification within the space of scientific inquiry. This will be presented against the backdrop of a broader picture of the function of anonymity in civil society. The chapter ends by listing and expounding what we identify as the three basic functions of anonymity within the Evaluation Machinery. The third and arguably ultimate function, namely, that of “parameterization”, explicitly reconnects the analysis of anonymity to the scientifically arbitrary (hence counter-scientific) computational and machinal aspect which qualifies that machinery as a “derailment” from the path of technicized and societized science.
