`Creative Solutions' and `Fibbing Results'

Abstract

This paper is concerned with enculturation in field ecology, where students are frequently required to spend long periods of time in the field with little or no contact with others. We document the practical choices that allow aspiring ecologists, more or less successfully (in their own accounts), to deal with the indeterminacy and open-endedness of independent fieldwork, involving a version of what Collins called `the experimenters' regress'. `Constraint satisfaction' is a suitable concept to describe how our participant dealt with this regress. However, `creative solutions' and `fibbing results' become viable options when problems are deemed insurmountable.