RT Article
T1 Crisis, Confidence, and the Limits of Replication
JF Zygon
VO 59
IS 2
SP 575
OP 90
A1 Brown, Jeremy 1964-
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1917282982
AB There have been calls for a program of replication in the humanities. Although usually thought of as confined to the hard sciences, replication may, under the correct conditions, be a useful tool for historians who propose an explanation of why a set of events occurred. But the program of replication in the humanities is challenged when we consider degrees of freedom, i.e., the number of independent parameters that function within a system. Evidence from the sciences has revealed that experimental variables once thought of as unimportant might in fact be critical. Change just one of them and the experimental result changes in ways that were at first unimaginable. How then, are we to know if the degrees of freedom offered as part of a historical explanation are indeed satisfactory? There are constraints to what may be replicated, but this is the case for the sciences no less than for the humanities.
K1 Confidence
K1 Crisis
K1 Humanities
K1 Replication
DO 10.16995/zygon.11502