Nosek et al. (1) recently joined others in advocating for “widespread adoption of preregistration” as a tool for advancing science. The language they use in making this important argument, however, creates unnecessary confusion: Like many others discussing these issues, they seem to conflate the goal of theory falsification with the goal of constraining type I error. This masks a crucial distinction between two types of preregistration: preregistering a theoretical, a priori, directional prediction (which serves to clarify how a hypothesis is constructed) and preregistering an analysis plan (which serves to clarify how evidence is produced).
Indeed, philosophers of science have identified elements of both how a hypothesis is constructed and how evidence is …
↵1Email: aledgerwood{at}ucdavis.edu.
