Epistemic Laundering: A Typology of Transformations

The transformation of “local uncertainty into global certainty,” as Susan Leigh Star has put it, has been a topic of interest in science and technology studies from the early days of the field. These processes have recently attracted the attention of scientists in the context of the reproducibility crisis. Statistician Andrew Gelman has, for example, expressed concern about how “statistics is often sold as a sort of alchemy that transmutes randomness into certainty,”....