This is a great podcast that gets into some of the issues and challenges with constructing knowledge in the human sciences. Though we differentiate between the human and natural sciences, both use similar processes to construct experiments and rely on similar reasoning processes to construct knowledge. One key idea in both types of science is the idea that experiments can be reproduced and results can be replicated in order to validate a study’s findings. What happens when you can’t reproduce a prior finding? Were the original results fraudulent? Poorly constructed experiments? Was the new experiment faulty? The answer to these questions is complicated but this podcast delves into some of those issues.
“Lots of psychology studies fail to produce the same results when they are repeated. How do scientists know what’s true?”
http://www.npr.org/player/embed/479201596/479202167
TOK Topics 