Data Can Be Underdetermined, Too

This paper focuses on a type of underdetermination that has barely received any philosophical attention: underdetermination of data. I show how one particular type of data—RNA sequencing data, arguably one of the most important data types in contemporary biology and medicine—is underdetermined, because RNA sequencing experiments often do not determine a unique data set. Instead, different ways of generating usable data can result in vastly different, and even incompatible, data sets. But, since it is often impossible to adjudicate among these different ways of generating data, ‘the data’ coming out of such experiments is underdetermined.