The experimenters on both sides of the spontaneous generation debate at the time had no way of independently verifying their most important auxiliary assumption. There is no way to get started, in such a situation, without assigning some likelihoods from scratch—not arbitrarily, exactly, but without the constraints imposed by a preexisting scheme for interpreting evidence. Needless to say, different scientists will choose different starting places, heavily influenced by personal tastes or aspirations. From that point on their estimates of evidential weight are liable to head in disparate
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