 The emphasis on statistics as key adjudicator of validity and reliability of patterns extracted from data is not novel. Exponents of logical empiricism looked for logically watertight methods to secure and justify inference from data, and their efforts to develop a theory of probability proceeded in parallel with the entrenchment of statistical reasoning in the sciences in the first half of the twentieth century (Romeijn 2017). In the early 1960s, Patrick Suppes offered a seminal link between statistical methods and the philosophy of science through his work on the production and interpretation of data models. As a philosopher deeply embedded in experimental practice, Suppes was interested in the means and motivations of key statistical procedures for data analysis such as data reduction and curve fitting. He argued that once data are adequately prepared for statistical modelling, all the concerns and choices that motivated data processing become irrelevant to their analysis and interpretation. This inspired him to differentiate between models of theory, models of experiment and models of data, noting that such different components of inquiry are governed by different logics and cannot be compared in a straightforward way. For instance, 