BernardSmith
Senior Member
This is actually a fascinating topic, (the sociology of science) although not perhaps for this discussion space. Science, after all is a thoroughly human activity performed by flesh and blood people engaging with other people. But that said I think that members of a lab or setting may recast and explain findings in ways that best suit their purposes - after all despite what programs like CSI claim, evidence does not speak for itself. Rather, someone speaks for the evidence but explaining away or dismissing or ignoring data ("evidence"). This is how we make sense of the world. ( "Fred does not know how to calibrate the meter with enough precision. You have to ignore all the outliers in his dataset". And "Jane never gets her sample to live longer than 3 days...and those of hers that live for a week may be different from the rest of our population")
In every classroom in every school on the planet a kid performs an experiment that clearly shows that the acceleration due to gravity is NOT 10 m/s/s, but no physicist or mechanical engineer would treat those experiments as opening up questions about what we know about gravity ... They would explain away the aberrant findings by arguing that the air resistance was improperly calculated, the relative roughness of the ball bearing was not taken into account, the friction generated by of the surface of the slope was not accurately measured, the velocity of the ball was inaccurately measured, etc etc. Scientists and all of us, make sense of data. Almost every post on this forum is an attempt to make good sense of evidence or data - often skimpy data..
How we make sense of "data" is what fascinates sociologists like me but how we make sense of data is not the same thing as deliberately manipulating data to make a point.
