On Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:08:12 -0700, Allen Esterson wrote: >Michael Sylvester wrote: >>If scientific findings represent flawless objectivity,
A curious statement if there ever was one. Is Dr. Sylvester actually posing a counterfactual in contrast to referring to actual beliefs or conditions? His statement seems to have more in common with something like: "If pigs had wings...." >>why do need replications? One would, of course, have to be clearer by what one means by "flawless objectivity", but it appears to embody a highly deterministic viewpoint about the nature of reality, that is, if everything that needs to be known about a phenomenon is known AND THERE IS NO SOURCE OF RANDOM OR SYSTEMATIC ERROR, then a single demonstration of an outcome in the context of an experimental design would be sufficient and the need for replication would be negligible because under these conditions it is expected that the same result would always be expected (recall the recent thread on whether coin-tossing representts a real random process; when all relevant variables are controlled and environmental conditions are kept constant, only one outcome will be produced). >If you presuppose an erroneous premise as here, the question is redundant. Well, it is not clear what the premise is and given Dr. Sylvester's non-eurocentric mode of thinking about things it is not clear that the concepts of "error", "truth", or "meaningfulness" (outside of a limited community) are relevant. He could, however, be stating a counterfactual in which case the truth of the premise is not the issue: start by assuming that the premise is true and then extrapolate/deduce what follows. If, however, Dr. Sylvester's conditional statement is actually meant to refer to actual scientific practice, then it would be worthwhile for him to provide cases where replications are not necessary. Working scientists, on the other hand, might view Dr. Sylvester's statement as either (a) bizzare because few scientific findings are based on "flawless" objectivity (flawed objectivity, that is, observations are made with error and this is common practice [psychometrics is concerned with estimating and controlling different types of error] because there are few situations where errors can be forced to be zero or close to zero) or (b) the purpose of experimental design is to identifiy all of the variables that may affect a causal relationship that is the focus of the experimental design and attempt to control for them or minimize the effect of these nuisance variable on variables involved in the causal relationship under study. A researcher with good experimental design background will be familiar with the threats to internal validity which would undermine one's claim that a causal relationship exists, threats to external validity which would limit the extent to which the causal relationship applies, threats to statistical conclusion validity which would undermine whether one's analaysis of the causal relationship is in fact statistically valid, and so on with other types of validities such as construct validity, etc. Scientific findings are unlike mere anecdotes where the focus is on how good a story is and whether our cognitive heuristics readily process the story points (e.g., does the story match up with concepts activated by the representative heuristics, does the availability heuristic work to activate relevant recent event to serve as partial support for the story, does the simulation heuristic allow one to construct the causal thread that connects one elements/episodes in the anecdote into a coherent thread that holds all of the statements made in the anecdote together?). People may believe that what they say is true, honest, accurate, and sincere. Of course, as research on eyewitness testimony has shown, belief in what one thinks and the factual foundation for what one thinks are two different things. As an exercise, I found suggest watching Akira Kurosawa's film "Rashomon". In one sense it is a police procedure like a CSI or an "Land & Order" episode: a crime was committed and the authorities must decide who is responsible. The trick that Kurosawa uses is that of the "unreliable narrator", that is, the narrator in a story, play, film cannot be trusted to provide an accurate, factual, and honest narration (a reliable narrator obeys Grices conversational maxims while an unreliable narrator violates them and more); see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator Kurosawa embeds narrations within narrations and the naive film view will easily lose track of who is relating what (it is the woodcutter who provides the master narration and relates what he remembers of the narration of other actors -- but it becomes clear that he is an unreliable narrator because he does not want to admit to the crime *HE* committed, namely, stealing a pearl handle knife that may have been used in killing one of the main characters). The film "Rashomon" is a great story with great ambiguity about what actually happened but with a "Hollywood Ending". Because of the ambiguity, some people have claimed that the film "Rahsomon" shows that all people's perception and memory for an event are equally true, though the converse is also true, that is, they are equally untrue -- if one isn't comparing what was said with the "facts". In "Rashomon", the viewer never learns what the authorities conclude, we are left with the unreliable narrations provided by the key players. As an antipode to "Rahsomon", I suggest watching Yoshitaro Nomura's "Zero Focus", another Japanese suspense/mystery film where the police procedural work is take care of early in the film, the "official version" of what happened is presented, and then the movie really begins: what really happened and why? For more, see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0227858/ (I'd also like to suggest Nomura's 1978 "The Demon" which some might find useful in developmental/child psychology classes; see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0202434/ ). However, if one is not really concerned with truth, the role of error in making good decisions, and the construction of valid knowledge and understanding, shall I suggest something by Hayao Miyazaki? See: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0594503/ This is for those more oriented towards "poetic truth" (i.e., where facts need no apply). -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
