Comments on the review of Statistical Inference

Abstract It is a rare event in the statisticalworld for a book reviewto take 15 pages (plus references). The three reviewers are all eminent in the profession, and have tried to be scrupulously careful in their reviewof a bookwhosemain principle they firmly dispute as non-Bayesian, and which they find not to be useful in their work. The length of the review demonstrates the seriousnesswith which they regard the book′s approach, and the importance to them of denying its relevance to either Bayesian analysis or practical data analysis with complex data. In responding to the authors′ review, I found it helpful to place our different views in the framework of Thomas Kuhn′s (1962) discussion of paradigm changes in science.