ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with philosophy of science, and opens with a discussion of the traditional view of science. It mentions some of the difficulties inherent in this view, and considers various responses that have been offered to the critique of the traditional view. The chapter develops how statistical decisions can be regarded as part of an organized argument warranting an inductive inference about some part of reality. Thus, it attempts to address the question of "How does mathematical and statistical modeling relate to the more general enterprise of science?" The chapter focuses on the logic of statistical reasoning per se. It addresses questions like: What does a p value mean and what justifies its use? Can statistical inferences based on convenience samples rather than random sampling from a population be legitimate? What factors contribute to the fact that attempts to replicate published findings often either are deemed failures or yield estimated effect sizes that are smaller than those originally reported?
