Stephen Pethick

The ‘Sixth Report—Reproducibility and Research Integrity’ (UK House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee 2023. ‘Sixth Report—Reproducibility and Research Integrity’) (‘The Report’) recommends measures designed to tackle an alleged ‘reproducibility crisis’ in scientific research. Our systematic analysis of the content of this report revealed that its findings and recommendations are consistent with the scientific literature, including the acknowledgement that conclusive evidence demonstrating the existence of a ‘reproducibility crisis’ is lacking. Though conceding that there is currently no way to determine the size of the crisis or whether it even exists, The Report nevertheless proposes actions to tackle the alleged crisis. However, without a quantitative understanding, the efficacy of the proposed measures cannot be verified. Hence, the current approach towards the alleged reproducibility crisis, here exemplified by The Report, does not adhere to the standards that would normally applied to the scientific method. An evidence-based approach requires the establishment of a quantitative understanding of whether data variability in the research literature exceeds technically achievable levels of reproducibility. If it does, the resulting understanding will enable the design of actions, whose success can be monitored. Our findings emphasise that the research environment requires the same level of rigour and scrutiny as the scientific experiments themselves.

The ‘Sixth Report—Reproducibility and Research Integrity’ (UK House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee 2023. ‘Sixth Report—Reproducibility and Research Integrity’) (‘The Report’) recommends measures designed to tackle an alleged ‘reproducibility crisis’ in scientific research. Our systematic analysis of the content of this report revealed that its findings and recommendations are consistent with the scientific literature, including the acknowledgement that conclusive evidence demonstrating the existence of a ‘reproducibility crisis’ is lacking. Though conceding that there is currently no way to determine the size of the crisis or whether it even exists, The Report nevertheless proposes actions to tackle the alleged crisis. However, without a quantitative understanding, the efficacy of the proposed measures cannot be verified. Hence, the current approach towards the alleged reproducibility crisis, here exemplified by The Report, does not adhere to the standards that would normally applied to the scientific method. An evidence-based approach requires the establishment of a quantitative understanding of whether data variability in the research literature exceeds technically achievable levels of reproducibility. If it does, the resulting understanding will enable the design of actions, whose success can be monitored. Our findings emphasise that the research environment requires the same level of rigour and scrutiny as the scientific experiments themselves.

In his book The Force of Law, Frederick Schauer is surprisingly insistent that pineapple wine is wine. Deploying Schauer’s observation as a point of departure, I here examine two-word compound terms in law. Taking terms associated with, for example, privacy in illustration, I explore the problems encountered by academic and juristic articulation of compound terms, demonstrating that many perceived difficulties arise because of inadvertent logical mistake and linguistic oversight. Through this analysis I show that we have often been too quick to impute to concepts a meaning that is stipulated or otherwise technical, where those understandings are in fact ordinary and commonplace. This analysis suggests that greater methodological ground-clearing is required before drawing conclusions about distinctive, distinguishable vocabularies and languages in law and legal reasoning.

This paper challenges the popular but undefended view that ‘coherence’ is a matter of degree. Deploying philosophy of language, logic and linguistics, the paper aims to show that coherence’s degree credentials are a striking illusion, thereby prompting two significant worries: (i) a specific concern about present misunderstanding and misuse of coherence and (ii) a general concern about the misunderstanding and misuse of degree. This analysis encourages similar re-evaluation of degree claims made for other high-value concepts in law and beyond, whilst resolving some of the difficulties presently frustrating the successful deployment of coherence in legal theory, legal practice and public policy.

Although coherence has become one of the key concepts in contemporary legal theory, its meaning is taken almost universally to be elusive, complex and controversial. However, these difficulties are due just to the failure of commentators to distinguish the intension of the notion from other features of its (many) referents in extension. The oversight has caused qualities to be ascribed routinely to coherence that properly attach to various object(s) of which coherence is predicated, and which a theorist happens to have in mind when bringing coherence into view. This conceptual error has significance for the substance of present claims made for the use of the notion in law. Freed from the entanglement, coherence emerges thinner and fitter, better able to be deployed with confidence in legal application.