Congist'26: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Crisis

What Was the Replication Crisis?

D2-S4-D310

14 May 2026, 15:55

20m

D310 (Istanbul University Faculty of Letters)

Oral Presentation Session 4.5 (Day 2)

Speaker

Samuel Fletcher (University of Oxford)

Description

In the last decade or so, especially in social and cognitive psychological science, the term “replication crisis” has come to denote a phenomenon that has spurred widespread discussion and continuing methodological change in those disciplines. But there is a surprising lack of discussion about what, exactly, this phenomenon has been: what sort of crisis has it been, and what role has replication played in it? Moreover, the little discussion that has occurred has been ad hoc, with little theoretical grounding.

In the first phase of this project, I explore descriptive and normative answers to these questions and attempts to reframe the crisis, e.g., as a “credibility revolution”. I argue that: (1) the crisis has concerned both researchers’ perception of the epistemic and social status of psychology in society and its proper epistemic functioning; (2) replication’s role in this crisis has not been as a cause, but as a sign of crisis; and (3) attempts to explain away the signs of crisis, e.g., as a kind of fallacy of reasoning, have been unsuccessful. These features, I conclude, fit well with an amended account of scientific crisis due to Thomas Kuhn, according to which crisis is constituted by scientists' loss of faith in the scientific paradigm to adjudicate what counts as legitimate scientific puzzles and solutions thereto. Importantly, while Kuhn tended to focus on the theoretical paradigms of physics, in my proposed amended conception, such paradigms can be methodological. Indeed, the replication crisis has concerned the paradigm for designing experiments and analyzing the data therefrom.

Kuhnian accounts make crisis open to empirical study. In the second phase of this project, I propose an empirical study to check whether researchers’ perception of crisis has changed since its advent. I hypothesize it has significantly diminished through ongoing reforms. (This would of course not entail that reform should slacken, even if the crisis has so far been resolved.)