The Phenomenon of Reproducibility from the Point of View of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science

Abstract

The article analyzes the phenomenon of reproducibility (repeatability, replica­tion), its terminological variations and grounds for assessing the current stage of development of science as a crisis in terms of reproducibility (verification) of scientific research results and their acquisition of intersubjective status. Attention is drawn to the fact that judgments about the crisis of reproducibility apply to al­most all areas of science, including such (often called exact) sciences such as physics and chemistry. We claim that understanding the phenomenon of repro­ducibility directly affects decision-making policy towards science (regulation of the activity of scientific directions and their funding). At the same time, the situ­ation in the social, humanitarian and biomedical sciences is of particular con­cern, since the level of reproducibility here is quite low. This applies to modern neuroscience as well. From the point of view of epistemological view, it is pro­posed to interpret reproducibility procedures as an attempt to overcome funda­mental limitations associated with measurement processes. It is shown that un­derstanding the meaning and significance of these procedures depends on the opinion of the disciplinary scientific communities, which differ in their ap­proaches to the criteria of reproducibility and follow different cognitive tradi­tions and attitudes. It is emphasized that in the social and humanitarian fields of knowledge it is necessary to take into account the “contextuality” of the mea­surement process, the constant and inevitable dynamics of the characteristics of society, culture and the person himself. All this push us to think about the prob­lem of defining the boundaries of de-anthropologization of scientific knowledge. An attempt is made to comprehend the phenomenon of reproducibility through the lens of the interval approach, and it is stated that reproducibility (ontologi­cally) is limited by the “pervasive inaccuracy of the real world” (L. Zadeh).