Author Description

Imagine Two Worlds. In One, Laws, Causal Relations, And Mechanisms Are Stable. In The Other, They Are Fragile And Unreliable. Our Actual World Is An Interlocking Mixture Of The Two, But For Many Of The Things We Care About Most, The Relations That Matter Are Fragile, And This Transforms Methodology. Because We Cannot Rely On An Explanation That Worked In One Case Still Working In Another, Fragility Requires Us To Re-establish Empirical Warrant Each Time. This Makes The Case Worker Central, Not The Theorist. And Although Theory Is Still Essential, Now It Must Be Developed In A Fragility-appropriate Way, Which Means Via Continuous Empirical Refinement Rather Than More Abstractly. A Lot Follows From This. Fragility Tells Against Many Uses Of Laboratory Experiments, Statistical Methods, And Big Data, While It Tells In Favor Of Qualitative Methods. It Suggests A New View Of Scientific Expertise. And The Classic Scientific Realism Debate Is Circumscribed Because It Applies Only To Half Of Science - The Stable Half. Fragility Also Tells Against Common Practices In Economics, Ecology, Epidemiology, And Other Field Sciences, Especially The Mistaken Urge To Build Grand, Universal Theories. At The Same Time, It Calls Attention To And Lionizes Much Other, Ingenious Work In These Fields That Is Effective Despite Difficult Circumstances. A Philosophy Of Science Attuned To Fragility Gives Us A New Handle On Science