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A Contractarian Solution to the Experimenter’s Regress

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

David Teira
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Abstract

Debiasing procedures are experimental methods aimed at correcting errors arising from the cognitive biases of the experimenter. We discuss two of these methods, the predesignation rule and randomization, showing to what extent they are open to the experimenter’s regress: there is no metarule to prove that, after implementing the procedure, the experimental data are actually free from biases. We claim that, from a contractarian perspective, these procedures are nonetheless defensible since they provide a warrant of the impartiality of the experiment: we only need proof that the result has not been intentionally manipulated for prima facie acceptance.

Type
General Philosophy of Science
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 80 , Issue 5 , December 2013 , pp. 709 - 720
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

This article has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science research grant FFI2011-28835. María Jiménez-Buedo and Jesús Zamora made very valuable suggestions at every stage in the development of this article.

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