Are there ecological argument forms?
The second reflection that Betts et al.’s argument structure raises for me is especially pertinent to ecology as a science. I am struck that the form of argument that Betts et al. present, in which the scientist is a rational actor passively selected on by his environment, is drawn not from ecology, but from evolutionary biology. If there were a standard argument form about, say, ecological succession that the authors had drawn on, using it here could be a clever and ironic meta-argument (if still not well adapted to the question at hand). However, it appears to me that there are no standard forms of argument about ecological phenomena. The closest thing I can think of is the idea that you derive hypotheses by extending a mechanism observed at a small scale across time and space. However, the qualities of various forms of reasoning about pattern interactions or up- and down-scalings over time and space are not well established. Ecology has systematically undervalued all forms of non-statistical reasoning (statistical reasoning also requires further discussion, e.g. Amrhein et al. 2019). Reasoning across time and space is, however, about more than statistics. It should also involve judgements about when, where and why certain kinds of scaling phenomena occur.
For example, we often use emergent-phenomena reasoning to explain the interactions of monospecific groups, but rarely heterospecific groups and never the assembly of species communities—why? We often use attractor states to explain degradation, but not to explain community assembly or interactions of monspecific groups—why? If I were to propose that we model degradation as being caused by an emergent property of multiple species interactions, or that we think of termite mounds as formed by moving towards structural attractors, these might sound “wrong”, but I posit that ecologists have developed very few logical or rhetorical resources for arguing for or against such proposals. Some ecologists might object here that the argument behind the model is irrelevant because the model either corresponds to (or predicts) empirical observations, or not. However, I am willing to bet that by relabelling the variables in a model of termite nest building or a model of degradation, the phenomenon they are supposed to be representing could be switched such that the model of degradation would now explain the canalization of the nest shape into a typical form, while the model of the termite nest would explain the reordering of species into an irreversible pattern. It is thus the model that is relatively irrelevant—only the argument specifies what it is that we claim to be explaining, and thus how we evaluate the model.
Betts et al., like most ecologists, rely entirely on statistical reasoning as their analytical approch to answering their questions, and thus structure the core of their argument in the form of predictions about whether hypothesis use has increased or decreased. This is, frankly, the most boring possible question that could be asked about hypothesis use. Other things one would like ask questions about are, at least in my opinion, the things I am talking about here. However, the question of whether hypothesis use has gone up or down is also, I recognise, one of the only questions that can be tested using available quantitative data and formulated as something that can be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’ through statistics. Betts et al. thus provides a demonstration of how a focus on hypothetico-deductive reasoning can limit researchers to asking and answering uninteresting, overly simplifed questions.