Abstract
When, in 2015, the replication crisis was identified in the field of psychology, many researchers took up the task of working on methodology and suggesting practices that would help improve the replicability of findings in psychology. More recently, it has been noted that many of the identified problems in psychology not only concern the collection of effects that are on shaky grounds, but also the theories that supposedly explain these effects. Many theories in psychology are narrative accounts of hypotheses that do not give clear predictions for empirical data. Because of the omnipresence of such weak theories and the problems that have been linked to it, psychology is said to be in a ‘theory crisis’. In response to these problems, systematic methodologies for constructing and evaluating theories are currently being developed in several research groups in psychology. The literature on the theory crisis is one to which both psychological scientists and philosophers of science contribute. Our symposium furthers this collaboration by bringing together four people who work in a psychology department and three people who work in a philosophy department to talk about theory construction in order to help psychology move past the theory crisis.
