Making our “meta-hypotheses” clear: heterogeneity and the role of direct replications in science

This paper argues that some of the discussion around meta-scientific issues can be viewed as an argument over different “meta-hypotheses” – assumptions made about how different hypotheses in a scientific literature relate to each other. I argue that, currently, such meta-hypotheses are typically left unstated except in methodological papers and that the consequence of this practice is that it is hard to determine what can be learned from a...