This essay is a contribution to the history of methodological thought. I focus on key methodological criteria for successful experimentation, replication and multiple determinations of empirical evidence. Drawing on reports of experiments with viper venom from the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, as well as on present-day methodological thought I examine whether past experimenters regarded repetition, replication, and multiple determinations as criteria for validity; what exactly they meant by this; what they hoped to gain by repeating, varying, triangulating, and (...) replicating; and how relevant these criteria were for them. I also consider if this analysis has implications for current philosophical work on the methodology of experimental practice. (shrink)

The life sciences are said to be in the midst of a replication crisis because a majority of published results are irreproducible, and scientists rarely replicate existing data. Here I argue that point 2 of this assessment is flawed because there is a hitherto unidentified form of replication in the experimental life sciences, which I call ‘microreplications’. Using a case study from biochemistry, I illustrate how MRs depend on a key element of experimentation, namely, experimental controls. I end by reflecting (...) on what MRs mean for the broader debate about the replication crisis. (shrink)

Discussions about a replicability crisis in science have been driven by the normative claim that all of science should be replicable and the empirical claim that most of it isn’t. Recently, such crisis talk has been challenged by a new localism, which argues a) that serious problems with replicability are not a general occurrence in science and b) that replicability itself should not be treated as a universal standard. The goal of this article is to introduce this emerging strand of (...) the debate and to discuss some of its implications and limitations. I will in particular highlight the issue of demarcation that localist accounts have to address, i.e. the question of how we can distinguish replicable science from disciplines where replicability does not apply. (shrink)