The thesis of the article is that "the facts of nature are decided within the field of human argument" (119). If that means that scientists decide what they think the facts of nature are through a process of (human) argument, then that is, of course, true. No one ever thought otherwise. If, as I suspect, they intend the stronger thesis that what the facts of nature are (not only what we think they are) is decided by human argument, then there is a real irony, since--in my opinion---the example shows just the opposite.

Why do they take the example to show that? They emphasize

• The experimenter's regress: What you take to be right controls how you interpret the experiments (116).
• "It is no accident that the routine scientific paper plays down such factors [personal appeals to a scientist's own skills and reconstruction of the details of everyday work in the lab 114]. It is the absence of these discussions which makes science look like a special activity" (115).

Latour and Woolgar describe the process of "manufacturing" scientific facts as one of freeing them from the details of lab procedure, who the experimenters are, the location in time and space, the brands of things used, and so forth. Thus, since Collins and Pinch are referring back to Latour and Woolgar, that can't be the main point. Thus, what is left is that when no facts have yet been fixed, the chief resource that is available in disputing what the facts are is appeals to the personal (human) details of the scientific work.

It is certainly may be true that, as Collins and Pinch seem to believe, the dispute about the whiptail lizards did come to rest on nothing more than personal appeals to status and experience, but that can't possibly show, in this case, that that is all that is involved in fixing the facts, since in this case no facts were established: the name calling was not enough to accomplish anything. Though that certainly doesn't prove it, that suggests that other factors may be necessary in settling scientific disputes.

Let's look at some other cases in which disputes did get settled:

• Worms learn. That was not settled by personal appeals to status and experience: the validity of the experiments was still in dispute when the dust settled. It was also not settled by settling what learning is (which might have been a matter of personal appeals to status and experience of the theoreticians arguing about definitions), since no such debate played any role. What happened was that the disputed experiments were "repeated" in rats. Since everyone agreed that rats learn, the new experiments unified the theory of worm learning with an established theory of rat learning.
• The Michelson-Morley experiment shows that there is no ether wind. No one interpreted the experiment in that way at the time, since it hadn't occurred to anyone to doubt that there was an ether wind. A new theory came along later (special relativity), according to which there is no ether wind and in which the basic mathematical method that leads to the theory is directly applicable to the Michelson-Morley experiment. Once again, we have unification, but of a more complex type: unification that is, in important part, reconstrual of the experiment.
• One might interpret the Eddington experiments along similar lines, but the case is less clear.

My (Quinean) account of how things get settled is quite different from that of Collins and Pinch. It requires something in addition to the personal appeals to status and experience that controversies over experimental results can degenerate into. What is required is not personal, and it is not merely argumentative in the sense in which Collins and Pinch seem to mean the term. What is required is further scientific considerations to break the tie. Since, in the whiptail lizard case, there are no such additional considerations and the dispute did not get settled, that seems to argue against the thesis of Collins and Pinch by showing that personal appeals to status and experience are not, in fact, enough to settle disputes in science.

Collins and Pinch do make a different important point earlier in the article, which is that it is often the case that personal appeals to status and experience are required to start a dispute.

-- ShaughanLavine - 30 Apr 2009