Thus, one consequence of insisting upon incompetence as the
explanation for all errors is that it prevents us from understanding anything
about fingerprint errors. In place of the fingerprint community’s unhelpful
and unsupportable insistence upon assigning all errors to incompetence, I
will suggest two sociological frameworks for thinking in a realistic way
about forensic errors.
a. The Sociology of Error
One way of understanding the fingerprint community’s insistence on
the incompetence hypothesis draws from a sociology of science notion
called “the sociology of error.”359 This refers to the tendency, in
commenting on science, to invoke “external causes,” such as sociological or
psychological phenomena, asymmetrically, to explain only incorrect results,
not correct ones. Correct results are attributed solely to “nature,” whereas
false results are attributed to bias, ambition, financial pressure, and other
such causes. For example, it has become commonplace to attribute Martin
Fleischmann and Stanley Pons’s premature announcement of having
achieved cold fusion to “psychological” and “sociological” explanations—
greed, ego, ambition, and the excessive pressure to publish first that
pervades contemporary science.360 However, such explanations cannot
explain incorrect results unless it is implausibly assumed that these
psychological and sociological forces are not operative when science yields
purportedly “correct” results. As Bloor puts it: