ABSTRACT
There can be no doubt that ‘replication’, in ordinary language, has something to do with the ‘sameness’ of or ‘close similarity’ between two or more events or objects. Likewise, ‘experimental replication’ in science seems to refer to attempts to ‘copy closely’ a prior set of experimental procedures and to obtain ‘the same results’. Replication in science is usually taken to contribute to the process whereby experimental claims are validated. Valid claims are supposed to be ‘reproducible’ by other competent experimenters and it is often assumed that experimental observations come to be accepted only after thay have been successfully replicated, that is, repeated exactly, by numerous independent observers (see the discussion in Zuckerman, 1977).
