Revisiting Chamberlin: Multiple Working Hypotheses for the 21st Century
By L. Elliott, Barry W. Brook. 2007
97 citations recorded by the source corpus.
ABSTRACT The method of multiple working hypotheses, developed by the 19th-century geologist T. C. Chamberlin, is an important philosophical contribution to the domain of hypothesis construction in science. Indeed, the concept is particularly pertinent to recent debate over the relative merits of two different statistical paradigms: null hypothesis testing and model selection. The theoretical foundations of model selection are often poorly understood by practitioners of null hypothesis testing, and even many proponents of Chamberlin's method may not fully appreciate its historical basis. We contend that the core of Chamberlin's message, communicated over a century ago, has often been forgotten or misrepresented. Therefore, we revisit his ideas in light of modern developments. The original source has great value to contemporary ecology and many related disciplines, communicating thoughtful consideration of both complexity and causality and providing hard-earned wisdom applicable to this new age of uncertainty.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Ecological Modeling, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b6a93c7f6e396842cf4434eb893f2c135ee1939
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Artificial Intelligence
In Ecological Modeling
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Developing multiple hypotheses in behavioral ecology (2010, methodology): “Ecologists have generally been enthusiastic about using Chamberlin’s approach as a framework for designing research, either informally or through model selection and multimodel inference (Johnson and Omland 2004; Elliott and Brook 2007).”