Abstract
In this paper, we consult the philosophical literature to improve suboptimal practices in psychology. We discuss several practices in psychology that in our view hamper its scientific development. We then argue that these practices are rooted in certain methodological and philosophical commitments. We suggest that psychological science updates some of these commitments with more recent debates in the philosophy of science, in particular those on theory formation, epistemic iteration and the use of models. Our primary concern is with three research practices in psychology, which we term epistemic freezing, empirical myopia, and data fixation. We discuss these practices and identify a common thread of logical empiricism and hypothetico-deductivism among them. First, many concepts in psychology are operationalized by standardized instruments and then get stuck in their operationalization, resisting changes in theories about these concepts. For example, if one compares current intelligence tests to the original setup of e.g., Wechsler in 1955, or one compares the current version of the Beck Depression Inventory to the original from 1961, changes are only marginal and rarely informed by theoretical advances. We call this “epistemic freezing”, as opposed to “epistemic iteration” which refers to the idea that measurement and theories about the measured attribute iteratively improve each other (Chang, 2004). A possible explanation for this tendency to “freeze” concepts is that this would give psychological science a shared empirical basis. Second, it is common practice to stipulate hypotheses before collecting data, and then proceed with confirmatory testing of these hypotheses. Most of the research methodology concerns the testing of a given hypothesis and ignores the research part in which ideas are generated and theories are built, so that testable hypotheses can be formulated. We call this singular focus on hypothesis testing “empirical myopia”, because by focusing only on the testing part, psychology loses sight of the more speculative and exploratory process of theory construction. This practice clearly reflects the confirmatory practice of science along hypothetico-deductivist lines. Third, in psychology, observation has become almost synonymous to ‘data’. For example, in methodology textbooks, theories are said to predict and explain data, where explanation is more or less synonymous to accounting for variance of a dependent variable. In addition, for each new hypothesis to test, one should collect new data. We call this practice “data fixation”, as the focus is on explaining data as opposed to phenomena. Again, we recognize an empiricist streak: the basis for our claim to knowledge is to be found in observed data, and anything that moves us away from direct contact with these observations presumably weakens this basis. Summing up, our diagnosis is that many current practices in psychology are still committed to logical empiricism and hypothetico-deductivism. To help psychological science move away from its somewhat outdated philosophical and methodological commitments, we suggest that it re-evaluates the role of psychological theory. Next to the methodological norms that govern data handling and hypotheses testing, psychological science is in need of norms for the construction and use of theory.
