If I ran a study that said whenever a bell rings at 11:45AM students in public schools exit their classrooms (99% within 2 minutes) and quickly file into the cafeteria, and that this was evidence for mass systemic Pavlovian conditioning, what would you say?
Might you say, "that's an impossibly unnatural conclusion", given everything we accept to be true, including our lived experiences--as students, as human beings.
Of course, it's a _logical_ fallacy to say so. But pure, unadulterated Aristotelian logic has surprisingly little application even in science. While as a logical matter such a conclusion on its face might not be impossible, it's not necessarily hyperbolic to label it so even in scientific discourse. Not the least because everything we know about Pavlovian responses suggests that there should be far more outliers, such that there must be at least some structural component involved, not a purely psychological response. In other words, the result is too _clean_. The real world is much messier, especially in the world of human psychology in complex settings, and the odds of seeing such a clean and consistent response relationship is extremely slim.
Quantum physics suggests that you could spontaneously teleport a kilometer away. Would I be wrong in believing impossible a paper that concluded that you spontaneously quantum teleported from home to work? What if the paper fails to establish--even nominally--the absence of other, less shocking, explanations?
Logically speaking, the teleportation might not be impossible, but in most others contexts (including statistics and other forms and methods of reasoning) one might fairly call the conclusion impossible, preserving the label implausible for scenarios more deserving of critical assessment.
> If I ran a study that said whenever a bell rings at 11:45AM students in public schools exit their classrooms (99% within 2 minutes) and quickly file into the cafeteria, and that this was evidence for mass systemic Pavlovian conditioning, what would you say?
> Might you say, "that's an impossibly unnatural conclusion", given everything we accept to be true, including our lived experiences--as students, as human beings.
No, I would say that there are alternate theories which better explain the data. And it would not be a logical fallacy to say that.
> Of course, it's a _logical_ fallacy to say so. But pure, unadulterated Aristotelian logic has surprisingly little application even in science. While as a logical matter such a conclusion on its face might not be impossible, it's not necessarily hyperbolic to label it so even in scientific discourse. Not the least because everything we know about Pavlovian responses suggests that there should be far more outliers, such that there must be at least some structural component involved, not a purely psychological response. In other words, the result is too _clean_. The real world is much messier, especially in the world of human psychology in complex settings, and the odds of seeing such a clean and consistent response relationship is extremely slim.
The problem with the "argument from too-clean" is that clean data occurs all the time. If you drop a ball in my living room it will fall down 100% of the time. Are we to disbelieve these results because they are too clean? Obviously not.
Look at your analogy. Obviously the migration to the lunch rooms isn't caused by Pavlovian response (at least not exclusively) but that's not because the data is wrong: the students do migrate to the lunch room at the described time. If you're claiming this data is too clean to be believable, then you're claiming that the students don't migrate to the lunch room in consistent numbers. This is just as wrong as the Pavlovian response theory.
Might you say, "that's an impossibly unnatural conclusion", given everything we accept to be true, including our lived experiences--as students, as human beings.
Of course, it's a _logical_ fallacy to say so. But pure, unadulterated Aristotelian logic has surprisingly little application even in science. While as a logical matter such a conclusion on its face might not be impossible, it's not necessarily hyperbolic to label it so even in scientific discourse. Not the least because everything we know about Pavlovian responses suggests that there should be far more outliers, such that there must be at least some structural component involved, not a purely psychological response. In other words, the result is too _clean_. The real world is much messier, especially in the world of human psychology in complex settings, and the odds of seeing such a clean and consistent response relationship is extremely slim.
Quantum physics suggests that you could spontaneously teleport a kilometer away. Would I be wrong in believing impossible a paper that concluded that you spontaneously quantum teleported from home to work? What if the paper fails to establish--even nominally--the absence of other, less shocking, explanations?
Logically speaking, the teleportation might not be impossible, but in most others contexts (including statistics and other forms and methods of reasoning) one might fairly call the conclusion impossible, preserving the label implausible for scenarios more deserving of critical assessment.