Fletcher, Samuel C. (2021) The Role of Replication in Psychological Science. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 11 (23). pp. 1-19.
Text
psychology2_name.pdf - Accepted Version Restricted to Repository staff only until 9 January 2022. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike. Download (207kB) |
Abstract
The replication or reproducibility crisis in psychological science has renewed attention to philosophical aspects of its methodology. I provide herein a new, functional account of the role of replication in a scientific discipline: to undercut the underdetermination of scientific hypotheses from data, typically by hypotheses that connect data with phenomena. These include hypotheses that concern sampling error, experimental control, and operationalization. How a scientific hypothesis could be underdetermined in one of these ways depends on a scientific discipline's epistemic goals, theoretical development, material constraints, institutional context, and their interconnections. I illustrate how these apply to the case of psychological science. I then contrast this "bottom-up" account with "top-down" accounts, which assume that the role of replication in a particular science, such as psychology, must follow from a uniform role that it plays in science generally. Aside from avoiding unaddressed problems with top-down accounts, my bottom-up account also better explains the variability of importance of replication of various types across different scientific disciplines.
Export/Citation: | EndNote | BibTeX | Dublin Core | ASCII/Text Citation (Chicago) | HTML Citation | OpenURL |
Social Networking: |
Item Type: | Published Article or Volume | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Creators: |
|
||||||
Keywords: | Replication, Psychology, Underdetermination, Confirmation, Lakatos, Reproducibility | ||||||
Subjects: | General Issues > Confirmation/Induction General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Experimentation Specific Sciences > Psychology General Issues > Theory/Observation |
||||||
Depositing User: | Prof. Samuel C. Fletcher | ||||||
Date Deposited: | 20 Jun 2021 04:09 | ||||||
Last Modified: | 20 Jun 2021 04:09 | ||||||
Item ID: | 19193 | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | European Journal for Philosophy of Science | ||||||
Publisher: | Springer | ||||||
Official URL: | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13194-0... | ||||||
DOI or Unique Handle: | 10.1007/s13194-020-00329-2 | ||||||
Subjects: | General Issues > Confirmation/Induction General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Experimentation Specific Sciences > Psychology General Issues > Theory/Observation |
||||||
Date: | 8 January 2021 | ||||||
Page Range: | pp. 1-19 | ||||||
Volume: | 11 | ||||||
Number: | 23 | ||||||
URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/19193 |
Monthly Views for the past 3 years
Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years
Plum Analytics
Altmetric.com
Actions (login required)
View Item |