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\begin{document}

\title{Reply to Betts et al. ``When are hypotheses useful in ecology and
conservation?''}



\author[1]{Meredith Root-Bernstein}%
\affil[1]{CNRS}%


\vspace{-1em}



  
  \date{May 08, 2024}


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Reply to Betts et al. ``When are hypotheses useful in ecology and
conservation?''

Meredith Root-Bernstein\textsuperscript{1, 2, 3}

\begin{enumerate}
\tightlist
\item
  UMR CESCO, CNRS, Mus\selectlanguage{ngerman}éum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France
\item
  Center of Applied Ecology and Sustainability, Santiago, Chile
\item
  Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, Santiago, Chile
\end{enumerate}

Words: 2045

It is difficult to disagree with Betts et al. (2021) when they claim
that hypotheses are often useful but sometimes not necessary. The
difficulty with Betts et al. does not lie with any of their individual
points, but rather with the lack of a clear argument giving them
structure. This is not just a critique of style. It is relevant because
it is an example of what I think is the real problem in ecological
research. In my view, the lack of hypotheses in ecology and conservation
is not just about the rise of big data approaches, or the documentation
of applied work. More generally, I argue that the low use of hypotheses
reflects the failure of ecology and conservation to value and develop
discipline-specific forms of argument, logic and reasoning. I first
address the particular nature of the hypothesis as an argument form, and
then the question of whether there are specifically ecological argument
forms. Finally I argue that we need a broad set of arguments and logics
suitable to the broad set of phenomona in ecology, and that hypotheses
are usually derived from non-hypothetico-deductive reasoning and logic.
If we want more or better hypotheses, we need more and better forms of
non-hypothetico-deductive ecological reasoning.

A hypothesis is a form of argument structured so that it can be answered
in only one of two ways: rejection or non-rejection. Hypotheses are also
characterized by particular ways of framing questions that are
considered legitimate, interesting, or elegant, which varies by the
discipline or subject matter. I will illustrate my points about the need
for forms of argument that fit a subject matter with the Betts et al.
paper itself. Betts et al. present their argument about why ecologists
should use hypotheses in the form of a couple of hypotheses, the
predictions of which they test in a hypothetico-deductive manner on
quantitative data using statistical reasoning. They structure their
hypothesis as though it were an evolutionary argument: they identify
potential discrete individual benefits of adopting a behaviour within a
specific environment.

\emph{Hypotheses ask narrow questions}

Two things strike me about this way of arguing about hypothesis use.
First of all, by casting scientists as rational actors who are passively
being ``selected on'' through their responses to cues in their
professional environment, this argument circumvents any discussion of
how science \emph{knowledge} is formed, or about how
science\emph{conventions and} \emph{social structures} are negotiated,
and the role of hypotheses in these processes. These fundamental issues
simply cannot be addressed with this reasoning. This characterisation of
science and scientists in the framing of the hypotheses is certainly
questionable. In this case the problems of the underlying theoretical
framing dovetail with the rush to frame the question as
hypothetico-deductive. The limitation to yes-no type answers in response
to hypotheses excludes, for example, answers of the type that raise new
questions. These might include, for example, ``in fact we find that
hypothesis use is a rather late step in knowledge creation within the
scientific process and most of ecology research programs are not in that
stage'' or ``in fact we find that hypothesis use is suitable for certain
types of questions, and ecological research is not oriented towards such
questions'' or ``in fact we find that anonymous reviewers are more
likely to reject papers that attempt to test predictions than those that
do not'' or whatever other issues might emerge from a less narrow
approach. Indeed, arguably Betts et al. is a case where the question has
been narrowed down to a hypothesis with a yes-no answer much too
early---so early as to eliminate the consideration of a rich set of
concerns and factors. The issue of how scientists construct knowledge
deserves much more exploration before carefully evaluating which, if
any, questions can be further refined into questions suitable for a
hypothetico-deductive approach.

At the same time, one might object that ecology and conservation
scientists are not obliged to structure their research questions by
drawing on epistemology (the study of how we know and come to know
things) and Science and Technology Studies because these are other
disciplines, and no-one is obligated to be interdisciplinary (but see
Boon \& Van Baalen 2019). Multiple disciplines exist since (to
simplify), historically, particular methods and approaches have been
more generative for particular subjects than others. This same
consideration is pertinent for within-disciplinary questions as well.
Just because we have historically drawn an arbitrary line around
non-human living things and designated them as ``ecology'' and thus
subject to the hypothetico-deductive approach, this does not mean that
hypothetico-deductive approaches are always the best means to understand
all aspects of ecological phenomena. My counter-claim is that we need to
be ``inter-methodological'' or plurimethodological even if we are not
being interdisciplinary. I will expand on this briefly below.

\emph{Are there ecological argument forms?}

The second reflection that Betts et al.'s argument structure raises for
me is especially pertinent to ecology as a science. I am struck that the
form of argument that Betts et al. present, in which the scientist is a
rational actor passively selected on by his environment, is drawn not
from ecology, but from evolutionary biology. If there were a standard
argument form about, say, ecological succession that the authors had
drawn on, using it here could be a clever and ironic meta-argument (if
still not well adapted to the question at hand). However, it appears to
me that there are no standard forms of argument about ecological
phenomena. The closest thing I can think of is the idea that you derive
hypotheses by extending a mechanism observed at a small scale across
time and space. However, the qualities of various forms of reasoning
about pattern interactions or up- and down-scalings over time and space
are not well established. Ecology has systematically undervalued all
forms of non-statistical reasoning (statistical reasoning also requires
further discussion, e.g. Amrhein et al. 2019). Reasoning across time and
space is, however, about more than statistics. It should also involve
judgements about when, where and why certain kinds of scaling phenomena
occur.

For example, we often use emergent-phenomena reasoning to explain the
interactions of monospecific groups, but rarely heterospecific groups
and never the assembly of species communities---why? We often use
attractor states to explain degradation, but not to explain community
assembly or interactions of monspecific groups---why? If I were to
propose that we model degradation as being caused by an emergent
property of multiple species interactions, or that we think of termite
mounds as formed by moving towards structural attractors, these might
sound ``wrong'', but I posit that ecologists have developed very few
logical or rhetorical resources for arguing for or against such
proposals. Some ecologists might object here that the argument behind
the model is irrelevant because the model either corresponds to (or
predicts) empirical observations, or not. However, I am willing to bet
that by relabelling the variables in a model of termite nest building or
a model of degradation, the phenomenon they are supposed to be
representing could be switched such that the model of degradation would
now explain the canalization of the nest shape into a typical form,
while the model of the termite nest would explain the reordering of
species into an irreversible pattern. It is thus the model that is
relatively irrelevant---only the argument specifies what it is that we
claim to be explaining, and thus how we evaluate the model.

Betts et al., like most ecologists, rely entirely on statistical
reasoning as their analytical approch to answering their questions, and
thus structure the core of their argument in the form of predictions
about whether hypothesis use has increased or decreased. This is,
frankly, the most boring possible question that could be asked about
hypothesis use. Other things one would like ask questions about are, at
least in my opinion, the things I am talking about here. However, the
question of whether hypothesis use has gone up or down is also, I
recognise, one of the only questions that can be tested using available
quantitative data and formulated as something that can be answered `yes'
or `no' through statistics. Betts et al. thus provides a demonstration
of how a focus on hypothetico-deductive reasoning can limit researchers
to asking and answering uninteresting, overly simplifed questions.

\emph{Hypothesis use in the context of other forms of reasoning and
logic in ecology}

While I agree with Betts et al.'s points about how hypotheses are
excellent for being explicit, thinking through multiple possibilities,
and avoiding your own biases, I cannot agree with what I take to be
their argument that the hypothetico-deductive process is the culmination
of science practice. In general, epistemology, like the ecological world
itself that is our subject, is heterogenous, varying, and complex (see
Liebenberg 2013). As I indicated above, our disciplinary line-drawing
around living things does not mean that they are a uniform collection of
phenomena that all behave in pre-identified ways. The identification of
problems, and the reasoning approaches needed to answer questions about
those problems, works well when it mirrors the heterogenous, varying,
and interacting structure of living systems, through the use of a mix of
multiple forms of reasoning, argumentation and logic.
Hypothetico-deductive methods are of course a hallmark of science, and
are powerful if used intelligently (following many of the suggestions in
Betts et al.), and if not over-applied to every question. The real
question is not whether to use hypotheses, but how to recognise and
develop a question that can be best answered with a
hypothetico-deductive process. This is not an easy question to answer,
and although many experienced ecologists and other scientists develop a
sense of how to track down and corner a good hypothesis, this is
something we should discuss more in order to develop disciplinary
aesthetics or styles around hypothesis formation (Root-Bernstein 2002;
Eastwood et al. 2013).

The equally important corrolary to this is how to recognise a question
that can best be answered with other forms of reasoning, logic, and
argument. This is especially true if we consider the need to engage in
interdisciplinary research to more fully understand socioecological
systems (Root-Bernstein 2016), or the desireability of engaging with
indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) in conservation and ecology
projects (Wheeler \& Root-Bernstein 2020). Having a range of forms of
reasoning, logic, and argumentation proper to ecology that go beyond
statistical answers to questions posed as hypotheses will provide
multiple avenues for communication and collaboration. There is also, in
my view, a benefit to the explicit recognition that ecological science
has (or should have) its own set of arguments, logic and reasoning, and
that it has (or should have) styles and aesthetics of different
qualities of reasoning. It is relatively more difficult to collaborate
with ILK holders if your only account for why you use the
hypothetico-deductive method is that it directly reveals the true
structure of the universe. When we can discuss our aesthetics and logics
around good hypothesis use, we open the door to being relativistic in a
constructive/ productive way.

\emph{We need other forms of logic and reasoning to develop hypotheses}

Finally, and critically, I would suggest that hypotheses are often
derived through reasoning that is not hypothetico-deductive in nature
(Root-Bernstein \& Root-Bernstein 1999). One reason why hypothesis use
may be low in ecology is because these other forms of reasoning needed
to create good hypotheses are undervalued and crowded out. \emph{Ecology
and Evolution} is one of only a handful of journals that have a specific
``Hypothesis'' article format. In my experience, an interesting and
novel hypothesis in ecology, socioecology, the ecology-evolution
interface, or conservation, can take multiple pages to fully reason
through, justify, and render precise, as different forms of data
(cross-disciplinary, observational, inductively derived, ILK,
experimental, etc.) are woven together. Darwin required several entire
books to work out his ideas. In contemporary ecology, the people who
write book-length research texts are mainly eminent scientists with
international reputations. These should not be the only people, or the
only phases in one's career, dedicated to ecological reasoning. We all
need experience with other forms of logic and reasoning to construct
good hypotheses. Thus giving space to the reasoning required to develop
interesting and novel hypotheses can also promote the development of
these multiple forms of non-hypothetico-deductive argumentation,
reasoning, and logic suited to ecological subjects.

Data Accessibility Statement:

There is no data to make available.

References:

Amrhein, V., Greenland, S., \& McShane, B. (2019). Scientists rise up
against statistical significance. Nature, 567, 3015-307.

Betts, M. G., Hadley, A. S., Frey, D. W., Frey, S. J., Gannon, D.,
Harris, S. H., \ldots{} \& Zárrate\selectlanguage{english}-Charry, D. (2021). When are
hypotheses useful in ecology and evolution?.~\emph{Ecology and
Evolution} .

Boon, M., \& Van Baalen, S. (2019). Epistemology for interdisciplinary
research--shifting philosophical paradigms of science.~\emph{European
journal for philosophy of science} ,~\emph{9} (1), 1-28.

Eastwood, J. L., Sadler, T. D., Sherwood, R. D., \& Schlegel, W. M.
(2013). Students' participation in an interdisciplinary, socioscientific
issues based undergraduate human biology major and their understanding
of scientific inquiry.~\emph{Research in Science Education} ,~\emph{43}
(3), 1051-1078.

Liebenberg, L. (2013). \emph{The origin of science} .~Cape Town:
CyberTracker.

Root-Bernstein, M. (2016). Personal reflections on natural history as
common ground for interdisciplinary multispecies socio-ecological
research. \emph{Geo} : \emph{Geography and Environment} 3(1), e00015

Root-Bernstein, R. S. (2002). Aesthetic cognition.~\emph{International
Studies in the Philosophy of Science} ,~16(1), 61-77.

Root-Bernstein, R., \& Root-Bernstein, M. (1999).~\emph{Sparks of
genius: The 13 thinking tools of the world's most creative people} . New
York, Houghton Mifflin.

Wheeler, H, \& Root-Bernstein, M. (2020). Introduction to special
feature: Integrating indigenous and local knowledge into conservation
science and decision-making\emph{. Journal of Applied Ecology} 57,
1634--1643.

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