Introduction

Abstract

Psychologists, despite their deep concern for them, seem to lack coherent theories of performance. The theories that do exist tend to be theories of phenomenatheories of word recognition, or theories of sentence interpretation, and the like; but large-scale theories of performance are lacking. Alternatives to microtheories are sometimes proposed as the underlying “pre-theoretical assumptions” guiding an investigation. The experimenter’s biases and assumptions, however, if not incorporated into an explicit theory, are nevertheless not pre-theoretical; they express the biases of theories held implicitly and guide and direct investigations as strongly as (or even more strongly than, if one believes in unconscious direction of thought) the theories that can be explicated. Theory surrounds us; we are immersed in it, and better to make it explicit than keep it tucked away in unspoken and sometimes unrecognized assumptions.