Thanks for your explanations. It would be lovely if primary sources and data were some kind of ground truth with a capital T. But no: they are often messy first

Thanks for your explanations. It would be lovely if primary sources and data were some kind of ground truth with a capital T. But no: they are often messy first pass experiments. If we knew what we were doing it would not be research ;-) A dose of Ian Hacking or Paul Feyerabend or Nancy Cartwright could be curative.