On conceptual rigor: “What do we take ourselves to be doing?”
I had the pleasure recently of attending a Festschrift celebration for Prof. Dorothy Bishop , who has been a leading light in the study of neurodevelopmental disorders (especially speech and language disorders) for decades. She has also been a vocal and effective proponent of improving reproducibility in scientific research, writing on her popular blog , on twitter , in journal articles , and even presenting in the houses of parliament on the subject. Dorothy’s efforts, along with many others in the Open Science “movement”, have helped to highlight crucial issues of methodological and statistical rigor that have led to irreproducibility across many fields, along with potential solutions and ways that the scientific community collectively can address these problems. These efforts are aimed at improving the quality of what we are doing. But there is sometimes a deeper question to be asked: why are we doing what we are doing? What is the conceptual basis for the research we’re c