Are meta-scientists ignoring philosophy of science?

Are meta-scientists ignoring philosophy of science (PoS)? Are they re-inventing the wheel? A recent panel at the Metascience conference engaged with this question, and the first sentence of the abstract states “Critics argue that metascience merely reinvents the wheel of other academic fields.” It’s a topic I have been thinking about for a while, so I will share my thoughts on this question. In this blog post I will only speak for myself, and not for any other metascientists. I studied philosophy for a year, read quite a lot about philosophy of science, regularly review for philosophy journals, have co-organized a conference that brings together philosophers and metascientists (and am co-organizing the next meeting) and I currently have 3 ongoing collaborations with philosophers of science. I would say it seems a bit far-fetched to claim I would be ignoring philosophy of science, and just reinvent what that field has already done. But I am ignoring a lot of it. That is not something PoS should take personally. I am also ignoring a lot of metascientific work that is done. That seems perfectly normal to me – there is only so much work I need to engage with to do my work better.

 

I read a lot of the work philosophers of science have written that is relevant for metascientists, and a lot they are currently writing. Too often, I find work in philosophy of science on the replication crisis and related topics to be of quite low quality, and mostly it turns out to be rather irrelevant for my work. It is very common that philosophers seem to have thought about topics very little, and the limited time they thought about a topic has been spent without any engagement with actual scientists. This is especially true about the philosophical work on the replication crisis. Having lived through it, and having thought about it every day for the last 15 years, most of the work by philosophers is quite superficial. If you spent only 3 years fulltime on your paper (and I know people who spent no more than a year full-time on an entire book!), it is just not going to be insightful enough for me to learn anything I didn’t know. Instead, I will notice a lot of mistakes, faulty assumptions, and incorrect conclusions.

 

I recently read a book from a philosopher of science I was looking forward to, hoping I would learn new things. Instead, I just thought ‘but psychologists themselves have done so much work on this that you are not discussing!’ for 200 pages. I found that quite frustrating. Maybe we should also talk about philosophers ignoring the work by psychologists.

 

As I was being frustrated, a thought popped up. There are very few philosophers of science, compared to the number of psychologists. Let’s say I read the literature on metascientific topics in psychology and philosophy, and only the top X% of papers make my work better. What is the probability that a psychologist has performed work that is relevant for me as a metascientist, compared to work by a philosopher? Because there are so many more psychologists than philosophers, all else equal, there will be many more important papers by psychologists than by philosophers that I should read.

 

Of course, all else is not equal. Psychologists have thought about all their crises for more than 60 years, ever since the first crisis in the 70’s (Lakens, 2025a, 2025b). Psychologists have a much better understanding of how psychological research is done than philosophers. Philosophers are on average smarter than psychologists (but again, there are many more psychologists), and have better training in conceptual analysis. Psychologists are more motivated to work on challenges in their field than philosophers. There are many other differences. So, we need to weigh all these factors in our model that will predict how many papers by philosophers of science I find useful to read, compared to the number of papers by psychologists I find useful to read. I don’t have those weights, but I have the outcome of the model for my own research: Most often, papers by psychologists on metascience are better and more relevant for my work. Remember: I still ignore a lot of the papers on metascience by psychologists, and I find a lot of those papers low quality as well! But psychologists write a lot more on the topic, and I also think the best papers on metascience when I combine both fields are more often written by psychologists.

 

I think this alternative explanation for why we engage very little with philosophers of science is worth taking into account. I personally consider it a strong contender to explain the behavior of metascientists to an explanation that posits that we intentionally do not engage with the literature in philosophy of science.

 

There are additional reasons for why I end up reading less work by philosophers of science. One is that I often do not agree with certain assumptions they have. The ideas that guide my work have been out of fashion in philosophy of science for half a century. Most of the ideas that are in fashion turn me off. I just do not enjoy reading papers that say ‘Let’s assume scientists are rational Bayesian updaters’ or ‘There is not one way to do science’. My working model of science is something very different, best summarized by this cartoon:

 

When I say I ignore most of the work by philosophers of science on metascience, I still engage with quite a lot of philosophy of science. If you browse through the reference list of my online textbook – which is about statistics! – I am confident that there are more philosophers cited than the number of metascientists cited in a book by a philosopher of science. If you browse through the reading notes of the podcast ‘Nullius in Verba’ that I record with Smriti Mehta, I am confident that there are more papers by philosophers than there are papers by metascientists in podcasts by philosophers of science.

 

I just wanted to share these thoughts to provide some more diversity to the ideas that were shared in the panel at the Metascience conference. When “this panel asks what is new about metascience, and why it may have captured greater attention than previous research and reform initiatives” maybe one reason is that on average this literature is better and more relevant for researchers interested in how science works, and how it could work. I know that is not going to be a very popular viewpoint for philosophers to read, but it is my viewpoint, and I think no one can criticize me for not engaging with philosophy of science enough. I have at least a moderately informed opinion on this matter. 

P.S. The Metascience symposium also discussed why work in the field of Science and Technology Studies is not receiving much love by metascientists. I also have thoughts about this topic, but those thoughts are a bit too provocative to share on a blog. 

References

Lakens, D. (2025a). Concerns About Replicability Across Two Crises in Social Psychology. International Review of Social Psychology, 38(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.1036

Lakens, D. (2025b). Concerns About Theorizing, Relevance, Generalizability, and Methodology Across Two Crises in Social Psychology. International Review of Social Psychology, 38(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.1038