Surrogates for Theories

Abstract

I first discuss several strategies that serve as surrogates for theories in psychology: one-word explanation, redescription, drawing vague dichotomies, and data fitting. I then identify two conventions that allow these surrogates to flourish and multiply: null hypothesis testing, which makes precise hypotheses irrelevant, and the isolation of research in different disciplines, which prevents the exchange of positive metaphors between fields.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 196 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.