CLARIFYING WHAT A REPLICATION IS

Abstract

In recent years, psychology is said to be in a replication crisis. But despite broad agreement among psychologists that psychology is in crisis, there remains significant disagreements regarding 1) the nature of replication, and 2) the distinction between direct replication and conceptual replication. In this thesis, I evaluate two theories of replication (Schmidt’s (2009) functional approach and Machery’s (2020) resampling account), paying special attention to how the respective theories deal with said disagreements. I ultimately conclude that Machery’s resampling account is superior. But despite Machery emphasising that replications should be distinguished from extensions, he does not provide a definition of extension. I attempt to fill this gap by extending the framework provided by Machery to give a definition of extension.