Half a House:

Abstract

Unlike many of the contributions to A House Built on Sand, William McKinney's criticism [WJM] of the chapter in The Golem which discusses cold-fusion research [CP that the ST and that we should be applauded for our attack upon the 'naively scientistic' [135] account offered by natural scientists in their own telling of the cold-fusion story. Our account does not, of course, escape criticism. McKinney writes that we tell an 'incomplete and occasionally misleading tale' [135]. According to him, then, we have built our particular house on solid ground our mistake is to have built only half a house. In particular, McKinney objects to what he takes to be our exclusive focus on 'human' factors at the expense of what he calls 'epistemological' factors. In this short Response, I will attempt to establish that there is an important difference between how McKinney (a philosopher) thinks, and how we (as sociologists of science) think, about so-called epistemological factors. This will help explain why McKinney thinks we miss something which we do not in fact miss. I will also try to clear up some residual points of disagreement. In The Golem, Harry Collins and I argued that the cold-fusion controversy was 'science as normal', in that controversies at the research frontiers are messy things, rarely decided by definitive experiments which are immediately taken to be compelling by all concerned. McKinney, too, thinks cold fusion was 'science as normal' only for him it was 'normal' in that it was epistemological and methodological canons which settled the controversy. Part of our disagreement stems from McKinney characterizing the S&TS approach as being concerned with human factors and 'interests' rather than with the science of cold fusion. This is incorrect, as I shall show.