Degrees of Corroboration: An Antidote to the Replication Crisis
The replication crisis poses an enormous challenge to the epistemic authority of science and the logic of statistical inference in particular. Two prominent features of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) arguably contribute to the crisis: the lack of guidance for interpreting non-significant results and the impossibility of quantifying support for the null hypothesis. In this paper, I argue that also popular alternatives to NHST, such as confidence intervals and Bayesian inference, do not lead to a satisfactory logic of evaluating hypothesis tests. As an alternative, I motivate and explicate the concept of corroboration of the null hypothesis. Finally I show how degrees of corroboration give an interpretation to non-significant results, combat publication bias and mitigate the replication crisis.