Virtual knowledge: bistable reality and the solution of ill-defined problems

Dynamic behavior is enacted from static observations, but as experience is reconstructed with concepts, mutual exclusivity replaces correspondence between the factors of action and observation. This bistable reality generates incommensurable world views between groups, which constrain measurement and give rise to a tension that enables change but also results in misleading accounts, as if behavior were in response to virtual knowledge. In the form of independent scientific peer reviews at a Department of Energy site, tension was applied to improve practices of science in the field. Implications for a physics of interaction are addressed.