Gobo Giampietro
Department of Philosophy, University of Milan, Milan, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jan 15;11:608451. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.608451. eCollection 2020.
Replicability is a term that not only comes with different meanings in the literature of many domains but is often associated or confused with other terms such as 'reproducibility,' 'repeatability,' 'reliability,' 'validity,' and so on. To add to the confusion, it can even be used differently across diverse disciplines. Though all named concepts are important, what makes them barely advantageous is that they do not cover some peculiar aspects of the replicability and validation processes, i.e., appropriateness of conceptualization; trustworthiness of operational definition and operational acts; accuracy of researcher's description, categorization and/or measurement; successfulness of observational (or field) relation. Moreover, in social sciences and organization studies, the concept of validity of data is highly questionable due to the quite frequent shortage of real statuses of the observed objects. The present paper aims to challenge the received view on the concept of 'replicability,' by proposing a "situational approach" based on the idea that replicability works under certain organizational and socio-technic conditions, and that it is heavily influenced by the way that different stakeholders (scientists, technicians, participants artifacts, and technologies) respond to them. Consequently, it is important to understand how and why replicability works in different contexts. Its main purpose, without denying the importance of current conventional perspectives on replicability and its siblings, is to widen and change them to include an organizational setting and a reflexive epistemology. This implies the pursuit of a third way of replicability, between the postmodernist negation of its possibility and its opposite, i.e., a naïve naturalism. A way asserting that replicability is a jigsaw puzzle or a mosaic, constituted by discursive practices (poetics) and organizational achievements guiding the politics of accountability, validation and legitimation. The domain here considered pertains to the social and organizational sciences. However, though going beyond the aim of this essay, many issues could be reframed and adapted to medical, natural and physical sciences, as some of the following examples can show.
可重复性这一术语不仅在许多领域的文献中有不同含义，而且常常与其他术语相关联或混淆，如“可再现性”“可重复性”“可靠性”“有效性”等等。更添混乱的是，在不同学科中它的用法甚至也有所不同。尽管所有这些命名的概念都很重要，但它们几乎没有优势的地方在于，它们没有涵盖可重复性和验证过程的一些特殊方面，即概念化的适当性；操作定义和操作行为的可信度；研究者描述、分类和/或测量的准确性；观察（或实地）关系的成功性。此外，在社会科学和组织研究中，由于观察对象的真实状态常常缺失，数据有效性的概念非常值得怀疑。本文旨在挑战关于“可重复性”概念的既有观点，通过提出一种“情境方法”，其基于这样的理念：可重复性在特定的组织和社会技术条件下起作用，并且它受到不同利益相关者（科学家、技术人员、参与者、人工制品和技术）对这些条件的反应方式的严重影响。因此，理解可重复性在不同背景下如何以及为何起作用很重要。其主要目的，在不否认当前关于可重复性及其相关概念的传统观点的重要性的情况下，是拓宽并改变这些观点，以纳入组织背景和反思性认识论。这意味着要探寻可重复性的第三条道路，介于后现代主义对其可能性的否定及其对立面，即天真的自然主义之间。一种主张可重复性是由话语实践（诗学）和指导问责、验证及合法化政治的组织成就构成的拼图或马赛克的方式。这里所考虑的领域属于社会和组织科学。然而，尽管超出了本文的目的，但许多问题可以重新构建并适用于医学、自然科学和物理科学，如下文一些例子所示。
