Psychological Theory and the Illusion of Scientific Prediction

The attempt of empiricist psychology to achieve scientific respectability through reliance on quantification is deeply flawed. Not only does it come at the expense of the phenomena, which, in the study of the mind, must reference subjectivity, but it is incommensurate with the basic scientific principles on which it claims to operate. Specifically, psychological theory typically cannot support prognostication beyond the binary opposition of "effect present/effect absent." Accordingly, the "numbers" assigned to experimental results often amount to affixing names (e.g., more than, less than) to the members of an ordered sequence of outcomes. This, I contend, is one reason why psychologists find it difficult to discriminate between competing theories: without a well-specified theory capable of enabling precise and detailed quantitative prediction, inferring underlying mental mechanisms from experimental outcomes becomes a difficult, if not impossible, task.