The role of replication in psychological science

European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-19 (2021)
  Copy   BIBTEX

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.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Why Replication is Overrated.Uljana Feest - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (5):895-905.
What Is a Replication?Edouard Machery - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (4):545-567.
Replicability and replication in the humanities.Rik Peels - 2019 - Research Integrity and Peer Review 4 (1).
Replication without replicators.Bence Nanay - 2011 - Synthese 179 (3):455-477.
The role of information and replication in selection processes.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2001 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (3):538-538.
Fraud in science an economic approach.James R. Wible - 1992 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 22 (1):5-27.
Who Should Do Replication Labor?Felipe Romero - 2018 - Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 1 (4):516-537.
Statistical Inference and the Replication Crisis.Lincoln J. Colling & Dénes Szűcs - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (1):121-147.

Analytics

Added to PP
2021-01-08

Downloads
64 (#228,544)

6 months
19 (#103,639)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Samuel C. Fletcher
University of Minnesota

Citations of this work

In Defence of an Inferential Account of Extrapolation.Tudor M. Baetu - 2021 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 34 (2):81-100.
A new concept of replication.Vera Matarese - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

Add more citations

References found in this work

The Logic of Scientific Discovery.Karl Popper - 1959 - Studia Logica 9:262-265.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery.K. Popper - 1959 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 10 (37):55-57.
Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.Imre Lakatos - 1970 - In Imre Lakatos & Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the growth of knowledge. Cambridge [Eng.]: Cambridge University Press. pp. 91-196.
Against Method.P. Feyerabend - 1975 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 26 (4):331-342.
Saving the phenomena.James Bogen & James Woodward - 1988 - Philosophical Review 97 (3):303-352.

View all 33 references / Add more references