Romero Felipe
Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics, and Philosophy of Science, Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Stud Hist Philos Sci. 2016 Dec;60:55-69. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2016.10.002. Epub 2016 Nov 10.
Advocates of the self-corrective thesis argue that scientific method will refute false theories and find closer approximations to the truth in the long run. I discuss a contemporary interpretation of this thesis in terms of frequentist statistics in the context of the behavioral sciences. First, I identify experimental replications and systematic aggregation of evidence (meta-analysis) as the self-corrective mechanism. Then, I present a computer simulation study of scientific communities that implement this mechanism to argue that frequentist statistics may converge upon a correct estimate or not depending on the social structure of the community that uses it. Based on this study, I argue that methodological explanations of the "replicability crisis" in psychology are limited and propose an alternative explanation in terms of biases. Finally, I conclude suggesting that scientific self-correction should be understood as an interaction effect between inference methods and social structures.
自我修正论的支持者认为，从长远来看，科学方法会反驳错误理论，并找到更接近真理的近似值。我在行为科学的背景下，从频率统计学的角度讨论了对这一理论的当代解读。首先，我将实验复制和证据的系统整合（元分析）确定为自我修正机制。然后，我展示了一个对实施该机制的科学共同体进行的计算机模拟研究，以论证频率统计学可能会根据使用它的共同体的社会结构而收敛于正确估计，也可能不会。基于这项研究，我认为对心理学“可重复性危机”的方法论解释是有限的，并提出了一个基于偏差的替代解释。最后，我总结认为，科学自我修正应被理解为推理方法与社会结构之间的一种交互效应。
