Abstract
Smedslund and Ross (2014) have offered us an interesting opinion article concerning the usefulness of empirical research for psychological practice. Appraisal of research is obviously contingent upon the way it is conceptualized and although the authors are involved with rather different kinds of practical problems they nevertheless conceptualize research in exactly the same way. This entails a possible mismatch between questions asked and methods used to answer them. I will try to add to the discussion by examining more closely how the authors conceptualize research and discuss the problems of mismatch between questions, methods, methodology, and epistemology. I claim that the authors’ view of research misses some important aspects of scientific reasoning and follows an unjustified epistemological position. Part of the arising controversy is a rather natural consequence of this but could be overcome by reconsidering the aims of science and getting epistemology, methodology and questions in line. Although I focus on the specific article and the authors’ positions, I hold that the issues discussed are common and general.
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Notes
Although the exact criteria for science (and scientific knowledge) are controversial, the claim itself – that it is a special way of creating knowledge – is not.
There are also other fundamental reasons for making questions explicit. First, without doing so it is not possible in principle to know whether a question got answered. If I do not know what I want to know, how do I know that I attained the knowledge? The only answer seems to be that I have to rely on some kind of feeling. I think that this is a very bad criterion of knowledge in any case but it is definitely not acceptable if the endeavor concerns someone else beside the individual researcher engaging in it and science obviously does! The space limitations do not allow me to go further into the issue but it is not as trivial as it might seem to some because there are researchers (usually following some of the qualitative approaches) who actively argue against having research questions and actually do endorse relying on feelings in scientific practice. For a thorough analysis and criticism of these and other problems see Toomela (2011).
Second, some questions are better than others and not all questions are meaningful. “The development of science is not determined so much by answering questions in increasingly exact ways; the development of science is determined by asking the right questions. Already Vygotsky (1982), following Münsterberg, suggested that it is much more meaningful to answer the right question even approximately than to answer the wrong question exactly.” (Toomela, 2010a, p. 9). So the questions need to be made explicit and analyzed in a general theoretical/epistemological framework to judge their relative importance and whether they are worth answering at all.
The adequacy of the theoretical claims is of course a matter of empirical research and testing the assertions in diverse situations and samples is obviously necessary. What counts as diverse is, however, again determined by the theory.
The alternative (actually in use by most scientists [and not just in psychology]) is open concepts (Pap, 2006) which are perfectly fine but require some caution towards them. As Meehl (1978) put it already years ago: “the unavoidability of open concepts in social and biological science tempts us to sidestep it by fake operationism on the one side (if we are of the tough-minded, superscientific orientation) or to be contented with fuzzy verbalisms on the other side (if we are more artsy-craftsy or literary), thinking that it is the best we can get. The important point for methodology of psychology is that just as in statistics one can have a reasonably precise theory of probable inference, being “quasi-exact about the inherently inexact,” so psychologists should learn to be sophisticated and rigorous in their metathinking about open concepts at the substantive level.”
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Tammik, V. Appraisal of Research Depends Upon its Conceptualization. Integr. psych. behav. 48, 384–392 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-014-9282-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-014-9282-2