Zahid Iqbal

Is Replicability Necessary in The Production of Knowledge? Discuss with Reference to Two Areas of Knowledge Institution Student’s Name Course Title Instructor’s Name Date of Submission Replicability has been considered a foundational aspect of knowledge inquiry for the past few centuries, particularly in the sciences. For different types of research, the credibility of experimental results that cannot be replicated, particularly within an empirical setting, is often undermined. This also applies to other areas of knowledge (AoKs), where establishing the replicability of research findings has been crucial for determining errors in the knowledge produced. However, knowledge inquiry is not always a perfect process; aspects such as bias and lack of absolute truth cannot jeopardize the replicability of knowledge. This thus begs the question of whether replicability is a prerequisite for the justification of valid knowledge within a specific AoK. This is what the prescribed title is inviting us to examine. Within this context, replicability will be defined as the ability of scientific experiments or trials to be repeated by experts to obtain consistent results. Is replicability required for the justification of knowledge produced? This essay will seek to establish that replicability is a necessary component in knowledge production by examining the natural and human sciences. Natural Sciences : Replicability is a necessary factor in the knowledge production process in the natural sciences because it facilitates the independent verification of data and is also considered a significant principle of scientific research. In the scientific method, there are self-correcting mechanisms such as replicability that strengthen the validity of evidence and findings by ensuring that other researchers are able to reproduce the findings of a specific study. For example, John Ioannidis, a Stanford University, medical researcher, highlights the significance of 3 replicability by arguing that its necessity does not only stem from scientists trying to justify the ‘correctness of results’ but also guaranteeing the transparency of what transpired in a specific line of research (Ioannidis, 2014). Therefore, across the natural sciences, research is considered valid when an independent team is able to replicate a published experiment. Replicability can therefore be considered a significant part of scientists’ process of building evidence that supports accepted theories. In the field of physics, the significance of replicability can be illustrated by the replicability is not necessary when it comes to knowledge production in the natural sciences.Corellated example like Jumping Jacks on Sport and Heart rate explore that replicability is necessary in following ways: The study was intended to examine the specific nature and an aerobic value of jumping jacks which has a greater movement in shoulders and is easy to perform in standing position without specific skill and equipment and in also a narrow place. Individual's self-selected (free) tempo in jumping jacks was determined for 92 subjects by administering it for 5 minutes. The optimal tempo was obtained from measuring energy expenditures on two subjects when they performed five minutes of jumping jacks at each tempo of 50, 60 and 70 times/min and also at one's free tempo. Exercise intensity of jumping jacks as a general endurance activity was determined from energy expenditures and % Vo22max of 9 subjects who performed 5 minutes of jumping jacks at 60 times/min. Training effect of jumping jacks was examined on the basis of the changes in Vo2max and heart rate (jumping jacks at 60 times/min for 3 min) before and after one month of training on 7 subjects who participated 180 jumping jacks at free tempo a day, averagely 6.3 times a week. Subjects were all college male students aged between 18 and 22. Followings are the results obtained in this study. 1) Individual's self-selected (free) tempo in jumping jacks was about 60 times/min. 2) The optimal tempo in jumping jacks determined on the basis of energy expenditure was also about 60 times/min. 3) Oxygen requirement and RMR at the optimal tempo (60 times/min) in jumping jacks were 40.9 ml/kg/min and 12.3, respectively. Percent Vo2max, Oxygen requirement and RMR in jumping jacks was smaller for persons who have greater Vo2max/body weight. When is replicability no necessary in the production of knowledge? In biology class, I designed an experiment based on the scientific method to observe whether the amount of sport conducted has a correlation with the amount of heart rate one has, in which, arguing the fact that the replicability of my experiment would be necessary to produce knowledge. The scientific method starts with an observation of a phenomenon through an event, the creation of a hypothesis, then the design of an experiment and finally performing the experiment and processing the results to answer the research question. Anyone who replicates my experiment would achieve the same results, since my experiment is based on humans conducting sport and anyone who conducts sport would have an increase in heart rate, thereby if one is replicating my experiment, the same knowledge would be created. Since the scientific method seemingly always allow the creation of a new experiment to answer a certain phenomenon, this only applies in the natural sciences field, since the instruments' taking part are consistent, therefore predictable pattern. If a certain outcome of an experiment cannot be replicated, that simply means that the creation of the experiment is wrong or other fields are contributing too much so that the outcome can be altered completely. Through time, the experiments are replicated and conducted repeatedly to ensure the outcome, and from that point on new knowledge can be built upon new observations from the newly discovered knowledge. Furthermore, the necessity of the replications can sometime be ignored, for example, it is factual that the more sports one conduct the higher the heart rate, this knowledge does not need to be shown through an experiment each time, therefore the replication of this experiment is not necessary. Newly formed knowledge found from experiments that do not have solitary sources and evidence needs to be replicated to secure that the newly formed knowledge is not established on coincidence. Human Sciences : In the human sciences, replicability is considered a benchmark upon which the reliability of findings or experiments is established and is, therefore, a necessity in knowledge production. Replicability has continuously been cited as one of the foundations of the scientific method. As such, the basic principle for knowledge production within this AoK is that an independent researcher should be able to replicate experiments under similar conditions and ultimately achieve the same result. Replicability, in this context, acts as a guide to whether experiments or findings contained any inherent flaws and whether the initial researcher paid due diligence to aspects such as the nature of the experimental design. Therefore, reproducibility is considered vital for fostering credible and robust research and for the promotion of scientific advancement. The significance of replicability can be highlighted by a series of studies that started in the midtwentieth century by psychologist Walter Mischel referred to as the ‘marshmallow test’ studies. In these experiments, Mischel found that children as young as four could resist the temptation of indulging on marshmallows placed in front of them to hold out for a more substantial reward in the future, i.e., more marshmallows. This experiment proved that when these children grew older, they were more likely to earn higher incomes and finish college. Since the late 1960s, this experiment has been replicated by different researchers. These studies reported that individuals who deferred gratification were more likely to receive higher SAT scores and become more competent (Watts, Duncan, & Quan, 2018). While, in a sense, these experiments might seem simplistic, they highlight the significance of replicability in the human sciences and why it should be considered a necessity. To counter this claim, it could be argued that the nature of the human sciences ensures that replicability is not necessary for knowledge production. While this analysis has indicated that replication is considered a cornerstone of the scientific method, direct replication studies are particularly rare in fields such as Cancer, This discipline ismuch more complicated because researchers have to rely on organisms such as human beings.Cancer is a scientific claim is said to be replicable if it is supported by new data. However, it is often not straightforward to decide if a claim is supported by new data or not. Moreover, the success or failure of an attempt to replicate rarely provides a definitive answer about the credibility of an original claim. When the replication attempt is successful, confidence in the reliability of the claim increases, but that does not mean that the claim is valid: a finding can be both replicable and invalid at the same time. Repeated successful replications can help to eliminate alternative explanations and potential confounding influences, and therefore increase confidence in both reliability and validity, but they might not eliminate all confounding influences. It is possible that the original experiment and all the replication attempts could be invalidated by a common shortcoming in experimental design.When a replication attempt is not successful, it is possible that the original was a false positive – noise mistaken as a signal. It is possible that the original claim was overly generalized and is only replicable under a much narrower range of conditions than was originally believed. It is also possible that the methodology necessary to produce the evidence is not sufficiently defined or understood, or that the theoretical explanation for why the finding occurred is incorrect. Failures in implementing experimental protocols may also result in replication attempts being uninformative. Similarly, we can also view how replicability is not the sole factor in the production of knowledge, since like the example above stated, when the experiment results can be reproduced all the time, then the information is based on replicability itself, in that case replicability is absolutely necessary. For example, a study to discover the behaviour of cancer cells, in which the study shows that cancer is nearly impossible to replicate due to its different behaviour on different hosts. Likewise, researchers conclude that effect of medical drugs that kill certain cancer cells are not effective on other cancer cells. This shows that the data replicated from experiments have no correlation with one another at all, or the degree of information produced is too minimal to be any useful knowledge. Which, in this case replicability will not be necessary in the production of knowledge, since cancer experiments can be replicated many times, but the results of cancer cells developing overtime not having some sort of pattern or correlation results in the replicability of this experiment unnecessary. In terms of participants willing to take part of the experiment to be part of the net data collected will also affect the drugs being handed out to patients, which can also be questioned whether the experiment conducted on the patients are ethical or not. Therefore, with the limitations of conducting the experiment itself and with ethics contributing to the factor of performing the experiment, the replicability of this specific experiment generates unreliable knowledge, furthermore necessary to understand the behaviour of the cancer cells, but the factor for production of knowledge this way is not replicability, therefore limited. Conclusion/Results : All in all, this analysis has been able to establish the claim that replicability is necessary for both the natural and human sciences, particularly in reference to knowledge production. Replicability has been shown to aid data integrity in these different fields by ensuring that through repeated experiments, research or studies, the scientific community can confirm the validity of a particular discovery and facilitate scientific advancement. In terms of knowledge that has formulated a consensus, the most certain knowledge is that which has been replicated several times. However, it is essential to highlight that in some cases, such as the human and natural sciences replication is not necessary for determining validity. Due to factors such as methodological difficulties and sheer impracticality, replication is not possible. Regardless of this, these studies are still accepted by the scientific community References : Baker, M. (2017). 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility. Nature, 533(1), 452-454.Half Got the Same Results. Retrieved from Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-replicated-100-psychology-studiesand-fewer-half-got-same-results-/Ioannidis, J. P. (2014). How to Make More Published Research True. PLoS Medicine, 11(10), e-.Norton, J. D. (2015). Replicability of Experiment. Theoria, 30(2), 229-248.Panek, R. (2020). A cosmic crisis. Scientific American, 322(1), 32-37,Watts, T., Duncan, G., & Quan, H. (2018). Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Gratification Delay and Later Outcomes.