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.