 Communication and the division of cognitive labor. Among the first issues to be investigated using formal techniques was the division of cognitive labor. While big science projects such as discussed by Hardwig pose a problem of integrating disparate elements of the solution to a question, the division of cognitive labor concerns the appropriate or optimal distribution of efforts towards solving a given problem. If everyone follows the same research strategy to solve a problem or answer a question, then a solution lying outside that strategy will not be reached. If such a solution is better than any attainable via the shared strategy, the community fails to attain the better solution. But how can it be rational to adopt a research strategy other than the one deemed at the time most likely to succeed? Philip Kitcher in his (1993) was concerned to offer an alternative to the strong programme’s proposal that controversy and the persistence of alternative research programs were a function of the varying social or ideological commitments of researchers. However, he also acknowledged that if researchers followed only the strategy judged at the time most likely to lead to truth, they would not pursue unorthodox strategies that might lead to new discoveries. He therefore labeled the observed fact that researchers pursued different approaches to the same problem as the division of cognitive labor and proposed a decision model that attributed the pursuit of a nonorthodox (maverick) research strategy to a rational calculation about the chances of a positive payoff. This chance was calculated on the basis of the likelihood of the maverick strategy being successful (or more successful than the orthodox approach), the numbers of peers pursuing orthodox or other maverick strategies, and the anticipated reward of success. A community can allocate research resources in such a way as to maintain the balance of orthodox and maverick scientists most likely to facilitate progress. Thus, scientific progress can tolerate and indeed benefits from a certain amount of “impure” motivation. Michael Strevens (2003) argued instead that the pursuit of maverick research strategies was to be expected as a consequence of the priority rule. The priority rule refers to the practice of referring to a law or object with the name of the first individual to articulate or perceive and identify it. Think of Boyle’s Law, Halley’s comet, the Planck constant, Avogadro’s number, etc. There’s no such reward attached to pursuing a research strategy devised by another and “merely” adding to what that individual has already discovered. The rewards of research come from being first. And to be first requires pursuing a novel problem or strategy. The division of cognitive labor, understood as different researchers pursuing different research strategies, is a simple effect of the priority rule. Muldoon and Weisberg (2011) reject both Kitcher’s and Strevens’s accounts as presupposing unrealistically uniform and ideal agents. In reality, they observe, scientists have at best imperfect knowledge of the entire research situation, do not know the entirety of the research landscape, and when they do know, know different things. They do not have sufficient information to employ the decision methods Kitcher and Strevens attribute to them. Muldoon and Weisberg propose agent-based modeling as a means to represent the imperfect, non-overlapping, and partial knowledge of the agents deciding what research problems and strategies to pursue. Solomon’s advocacy of dissensus discussed below can be understood as rejecting the premises of the problem. From that point of view the aim of scientific organization ought to be to promote disagreement.