00:00: There are often emerging critiques and counter-critiques within and across disciplines that challenge conventional wisdom and give us a fuller understanding of how the world actually works. Now, we as critical thinkers have a duty to be aware of and engage with the full spectrum of discourse on specific research topics.
00:35: One seemingly small way to do this is to hedge the claims you make in scientific writing. Hedging can be described as a conscious attempt to match your claims to the certainty of the evidence you have at your disposal. Again, this is an exercise I have given to participants in previous live editions of this course. This is an excerpt from a paper on urban informality in Ghana.
01:37: I asked participants to try re-wording the statement in a way that more accurately reflects the paper’s contribution. I get different responses, of course, but the most acceptable ones say something similar to this.
02:22: Notice how the words “clear” and “will” have been replaced by “better” and “would help improve.” The first to tone down the magnitude of the paper’s stated contribution, and the second to indicate the tentativeness of the relationship between the paper’s putative contribution and real-world outcomes. After all, no single study is likely to give a clear understanding of a topic as complex as informality, and no one can offer any guarantees that improved understanding will indeed lead to improved outcomes in reality.
03:11: Part of the trick lies in the modifiers and adjectives. It is not so much about the content of the claim as it is about the way it is presented, the certainty with which it is presented. You want to avoid adjectives that communicate unimpeachable certainty: words like “clear,” “absolute,” “total,” “complete,” and so on.
03:43: Before you put an adjective or adverb down on paper, ask yourself: is it really necessary? You’ll find in many cases that adjectives are extraneous to the meaning you’re trying to convey in a given sentence, and as such, they can be quite easily done away with.
04:02: Another drawback to adjectives is that they can be emotive, and you don’t want your writing as an academic researcher to come across as being sensational. You want it to be as factual as you can manage. The overarching message here is to always check – and that’s absolute – always check to ensure that the evidence you provide is robust enough to support the claims you are making.
04:33: Otherwise, consider blunting the certainty of your claims, including through the use of hedging devices. You may be wondering, wouldn’t hedging reduce readers’ confidence in my findings, or in my work as a whole? Now, that is an important question, at least from the viewpoint of a researcher.
05:01: You want your work to be taken seriously. In this regard, it is useful to make a distinction between the findings or results from your research, as the case may be, and your interpretation or discussion of those findings. You typically present your findings more or less factually, the way they have emerged.
05:31: Your actual data does not undergo any analysis at this point. Accordingly, the notion of hedging doesn’t even come in at this stage because you are presenting what you have found, or what your models have generated, in a relatively straightforward way.
05:54: This is reflected in the structure of a PhD thesis, where the first chapters you produce are your findings or results chapters, because that is the original data you are contributing to the existing body of work in your subject area. These findings will then be analysed in light of your theoretical framework and the literature review that you have done up until that point. This latter stage of analysis is what produces your discussion and conclusion chapters, which tell us what your work is doing to advance the current state of knowledge in your field as a whole.
06:44: And this is where you need to be circumspect in making scientific claims. If you have been muted or restrained in stating your conclusions, and somebody else comes along later on with another body of evidence disproving, or at least challenging your conclusions, you are able to constructively engage with that as a researcher and acknowledge that the new evidence presented has advanced the state of knowledge in your field.
07:20: It is a delicate balance, but again, what is important is to try as much as possible to let the level of conclusions you are drawing from your findings match the level of the evidence that you have presented. And I think that’s it. As highlighted in this article on flossing, good science can be hard.
08:17: A lot of the time, to be able to make conclusive statements about natural or human phenomena, you have to have surveyed maybe half of the inhabitants of the planet, which is probably never going to happen. All the more reason for all of the smaller-scale scientific efforts we make – all the more reason for them to acknowledge the limits of certainty and universal applicability of the knowledge that we produce.
08:54: On the issue of certainty, as the flossing article also eloquently states or articulates, it is a mark of critical thinking to understand and accept that, to a large extent, there will probably always be things that we do not know. We need to remember that this is the nature of knowledge, the nature of science. So much remains unknown even when we think we know something.
09:25: And this needs to come through in the way that we write and present our research, leaving room for the possibility that what is known today may be superseded tomorrow by something more enlightening, something that is closer to the true state, if you will, of the world. This is especially the case in the social sciences, where there is hardly any scientific position that precludes critical engagement.
10:03: Again, this is not driven by a compulsion to poke holes in the argument of other scientists. Rather, it is driven by the necessity of preserving the integrity of the scientific method and the imperative of advancing the greater good of the scientific community and of humanity as a whole.
10:31: This is why we need to constantly think about what we think we know as a community. This point was clearly demonstrated during the years-long COVID pandemic that began in 2019, during which the public health guidance seemed to change by the day, with each new science-backed measure announced with near 100% certainty, even though it was reasonable to expect that some more time and research would be needed to establish definitive relationships between cause and effect.
11:13: This just goes to show the contingent nature of science and of evidence. And that does not mean that, as scientists or researchers, we throw up our hands and give up because we think we are doing a poor job of it.
11:32: Quite the contrary. The more critical and reflexive we are in presenting our work, the more effective we are as researchers.