LAUSR

Abstract Despite the appeal of correctness batting average as a metric for evaluating analysts, such an approach may be fundamentally misguided. Scholarship in the sociology of scientific knowledge demonstrates the inherent difficulty of determining what ‘actually happened.’ Knowledge in intelligence is socially constructed by practitioners and experts, just as it is in science. Thus, the ‘truth’ about what happened in a particular circumstance is what a group of credential experts say happened. Intelligence studies might benefit from insights gained in science and technology studies to illuminate practices and modes of operation that have thus far gone unexamined.