The Replication Crisis; The Scientific Method; Kuhn on the Nature of Scientific Revolutions

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Bill Kerney

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Published on December 7, 2021 6:11:07 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmYzta-sfcI

Duration: 58:10

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Today we talked a bit of philosophy of science, covering three main points:

Kuhn's notion of how science progresses. Not linearly, but in fits and starts and lots of dead ends. Basically, his notion is that we have a prevailing "paradigm" in science, and we tend to stick with those paradigms making incremental improvements until too many errors (anomalies) accumulate, and then we have a "paradigm shift" in which we start using a new model instead.

We also talked about the scientific method, and how while there's a related set of concepts called the scientific method the details vary from field to field depending on their needs. There's not just one scientific method. As Kuhn put it, "The scientific method is what scientists do."

We then talked about the Replication Crisis, and how attempts to reproduce famous experiments in psychology resulted in less than half of them being successfully reproduced, with the rest either not being reproduced at all, or reproduced at a weaker level of success than their papers indicated.