Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact: The National Science Foundation’s Broader Impacts Criterion and the Question of Peer Review

Over the last 300 years science has been quite successful at revealing the nature of physical reality. In so doing it has provided an epistemological basis for scientific discovery and technological innovation. But science has been decidedly less successful at guiding political debate. How do we conceive of the science‐society relation in the 21st century? How does scientific research hook onto the world in a multi‐faceted, pluralistic, and global age? This essay seeks to reframe our thinking about the broader impacts of science by awakening an appreciation of the inescapably political and (and as a consequence, philosophical) dimension of all knowledge, scientific or otherwise.