Statistical Inference as Severe Testing:
How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (2018, CUP)

Deborah G. Mayo

Abstract for Book

By disinterring the underlying statistical philosophies this book sets the stage for understanding and finally getting beyond today’s most pressing controversies revolving around statistical methods and irreproducible findings. Statistical Inference as Severe Testing takes the reader on a journey that provides a non-technical “how to” guide for zeroing in on the most influential arguments surrounding commonly used–and abused– statistical methods. The book sets sail with a tool for telling what’s true about statistical controversies: If little if anything has been done to rule out flaws in taking data as evidence for a claim, then that claim has not passed a stringent or severe test. In the severe testing account, probability arises in inference, not to measure degrees of plausibility or belief in hypotheses, but to assess and control how severely tested claims are. Viewing statistical inference as severe testing supplies novel solutions to problems of induction, falsification and demarcating science from pseudoscience, and serves as the linchpin for understanding and getting beyond the statistics wars. The book links philosophical questions about the roles of probability in inference to the concerns of practitioners in psychology, medicine, biology, economics, physics and across the landscape of the natural and social sciences.

Keywords for book:

Severe testing, Bayesian and frequentist debates, Philosophy of statistics, Significance testing controversy, statistics wars, replication crisis, statistical inference, error statistics, Philosophy and history of Neyman, Pearson and Fisherian statistics, Popperian falsification

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4.8 All Models Are False

. . . it does not seem helpful just to say that all models are wrong. The very word model implies simplification and idealization. . . . The construction of idealized representations that capture important stable aspects of such systems is, however, a vital part of general scientific analysis. (Cox 1995, p. 456)

 A popular slogan in statistics and elsewhere is “all models are false!”  Is this true? What can it mean to attribute a truth value to a model? Clearly what is meant involves some assertion or hypothesis about the model – that it correctly or incorrectly represents some phenomenon in some respect or to some degree. Such assertions clearly can be true. As Cox observes, “the very word model implies simplification and idealization.”  To declare, “all models are false”  by dint of their being idealizations or approximations, is to stick us with one of those  “all flesh is grass”  trivializations (Section 4.1). So understood, it follows that all statistical models are false, but we have learned nothing about how statistical models may be used to infer true claims about problems of interest. Since the severe tester’s goal in using approximate statistical models is largely to learn where they break down, their strict falsity is a given. Yet it does make her wonder why anyone would want to place a probability assignment on their truth, unless it was 0? Today’s tour continues our journey into solving the problem of induction (Section 2.7). Continue reading →