Hypotheses ask narrow questions
Two things strike me about this way of arguing about hypothesis use. First of all, by casting scientists as rational actors who are passively being “selected on” through their responses to cues in their professional environment, this argument circumvents any discussion of how science knowledge is formed, or about how scienceconventions and social structures are negotiated, and the role of hypotheses in these processes. These fundamental issues simply cannot be addressed with this reasoning. This characterisation of science and scientists in the framing of the hypotheses is certainly questionable. In this case the problems of the underlying theoretical framing dovetail with the rush to frame the question as hypothetico-deductive. The limitation to yes-no type answers in response to hypotheses excludes, for example, answers of the type that raise new questions. These might include, for example, “in fact we find that hypothesis use is a rather late step in knowledge creation within the scientific process and most of ecology research programs are not in that stage” or “in fact we find that hypothesis use is suitable for certain types of questions, and ecological research is not oriented towards such questions” or “in fact we find that anonymous reviewers are more likely to reject papers that attempt to test predictions than those that do not” or whatever other issues might emerge from a less narrow approach. Indeed, arguably Betts et al. is a case where the question has been narrowed down to a hypothesis with a yes-no answer much too early—so early as to eliminate the consideration of a rich set of concerns and factors. The issue of how scientists construct knowledge deserves much more exploration before carefully evaluating which, if any, questions can be further refined into questions suitable for a hypothetico-deductive approach.
At the same time, one might object that ecology and conservation scientists are not obliged to structure their research questions by drawing on epistemology (the study of how we know and come to know things) and Science and Technology Studies because these are other disciplines, and no-one is obligated to be interdisciplinary (but see Boon & Van Baalen 2019). Multiple disciplines exist since (to simplify), historically, particular methods and approaches have been more generative for particular subjects than others. This same consideration is pertinent for within-disciplinary questions as well. Just because we have historically drawn an arbitrary line around non-human living things and designated them as “ecology” and thus subject to the hypothetico-deductive approach, this does not mean that hypothetico-deductive approaches are always the best means to understand all aspects of ecological phenomena. My counter-claim is that we need to be “inter-methodological” or plurimethodological even if we are not being interdisciplinary. I will expand on this briefly below.