Improving postgraduate researchers’ inferences with a philosophical workshop

Clark, Robbie and Hermida, Margarida and Russel-Pascual, Nicole and Munafo, Marcus and Ladyman, James (2024) Improving postgraduate researchers’ inferences with a philosophical workshop. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Postgraduate research training in the United Kingdom often narrowly focuses on domain-specific methods, neglecting wider philosophical topics such as epistemology and scientific method. Consequently, we designed a workshop on (inductive, deductive, and abductive) inference for postgraduate researchers. We ran the workshop three times with (N = 29) attendees from across four universities, testing the potential benefits of the workshop in a mixed-method, repeated measures design. Our core aims were to investigate what attendees learned from the workshop, and whether they felt it had impacted on their research practices six months later. Overall, learning inferential logic benefitted postgraduate researchers in various ways and to varying degrees. Six months on, roughly half of attendees reported being more critical of key aspects of research such as inferences and study design. Additionally, some attendees reported more subtle effects, such as prompting new lines of thought and inquiry. Given that self-criticism and scepticism are fundamental intellectual virtues, these results evidence the importance of embedding epistemological training into doctoral programmes across the UK.

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Creators	Email	ORCID
Clark, Robbie	robbie.clark.2018@bristol.ac.uk	0000-0002-2160-313X
Hermida, Margarida	margarida.hermida@kcl.ac.uk	0000-0002-0259-109X
Russel-Pascual, Nicole	nicolpa@umich.edu	0000-0001-7873-4184
Munafo, Marcus	Marcus.Munafo@bristol.ac.uk	0000-0002-4049-993X
Ladyman, James	james.ladyman@bristol.ac.uk