Gingras And The Rules Regress

摘要

Whew! What a relief-Gingras agrees with me that the anti-LIGO scientists (ALs) acted badly! How did I come to think he was commending them? There may be a methodological lesson here.rnThe story so far. The ALs reported that 4:1 of those they surveyed were against LIGO. I looked at the data and made it 2:1; 1 asked the ALs if I could publish the data so everyone could check my count against theirs. They refused. I said in my book I was 'surprised' by this. Gingras says I should not have been surprised because there is an easy sociological explanation of their action. I thought he was thereby justifying and commending the action.rnI now see I made a mistake in my interpretation of Gingras's remark. When he said 'Collins should not be surprised' (Gingras, 2007, p. 279) he was taking my surprise as being caused by my inability to find a sociological explanation in terms of actors' categories of why they withheld the data. He took that I had written something like: 'I asked the ALs if I could publish the results and they started playing the bagpipes', which would, indeed, have stumped me. As it was, I took it that the available sociological explanations for the ALs' action were so obvious that Gingras could not have imagined I needed his help to root them out. I therefore took it that when he said I should not be surprised he meant I should not be morally taken aback because the sociological explanation he offered resolved the moral dilemma. I invite readers to go back to Gingras's review to get a sense of how I was drawn into that mistake.