| > In my view, reproducibility is neither strictly necessary nor sufficient for scientific progress. In your view? Reproducibility is essential to scientific progress because it defines what science is. It's the backbone of science. Hypothesis,testing/experiments. It's what separates science from math, arts and pseudosciences like social "sciences". > I'm sure if you went back through the literature on something like electromagnetism, you would find results that fail to replicate, yet the theory of electromagnetism if applied properly is remarkably robust. How would it be "robust" if it couldn't be replicated? How would the theory of electromagnetism be robust if it failed to produce replicable results? > Scientific results can be strengthened by replication No. It can only be a "scientific result" if it can be replicated/tested. It's definitional. > Discovery of a psychological "effect" is perfectly scientific and interesting No it isn't if it can't be test/replicated/reproduced. It's not science. It's something else altogether. > And if those sciences are also plagued by irreproducibility, then they may embrace scientific methodology without producing a useful scientific knowledge base. There is no "scientific methodology" without testability/replication/reproducibility. All science is based on hypothesis-testing. |
I read that in the century after Newton, the French Academy offered a prize for evidence of the failure of Newton's laws. They gave out the prize dozens of times, yet Newtonian physics kept getting stronger and stronger. Eventually they stopped giving out the prize. Many of the contradictions apparently had to do with the lunar orbit, which was poorly understood.