ABSTRACT
But this chapter and the one that follows are intended to strip the application of science to profiling down to its essence. I assume in these chapters that the observation, collection, analysis, and then communication of data are the most appropriate means to attempt to know the world and the events within it. However, I also assumefollowing the work of philosophers like P. Kyle Stanford (2006) in Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives-that even with something called amply collected data scientists may not be able to conceive of those data’s best explanation, let alone identifying the data as the best among competing data sets. Stanford calls this contrastive underdeterminism, perhaps because scientists have not identified or just do not identify the best event to explain an event of interest, but only the best in contrast with a finite number of other events.
