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0TeopeTHHHi gocAig^eHHS y ncuxonoril. TOM 21 • 2024
V. A. Medintsev Are we moving forward or are we marking time?
A U T H O R
Annotation. The article is a commentary on the publication by Eronen M. and Brinman L. "Theoretical crisis in psychology: how to move forward?" (current ed., Vol. 13). The commentary notes the importance of the methodological issues raised in the article for the development of psychological thought. It is shown that these questions in a different terminological expression have been posed long ago and possible answers to them have been explored. The unresolved nature of the basic theoretical and methodological problems of psychology slows down its development and limits the effectiveness of the application of the results obtained, however, the essentially reformulation of these problems and terminological transformations of their components considered in the commented article are unlikely to lead to the expected results.
Keywords: theory and methodology, psychological phenomena, psychological constructs, epistemic iteration.
Citation : Medintsev V.A. Are we moving forward or marking time? Theoretical research in psychology: monographic series.. Volume 21. 2024. P. 75-83. doi: 10.24412/2616-6860-2024-2-75-83.
TeopeTHHHÎ gocAÎg^eHHS y ncMXonoriL TOM 21 • 2024
The commented article touches on topics that are of direct interest to me, including in the context of the direction of research that was developed by G.A. Ball and we are together. I, of course, do not set out to offer a deep and broad analysis, but will limit myself to the issues that particularly interested me.
The article being commented on is about the role of theoretical psychology in the development of psychological knowledge, about the problems of developing and improving its theoretical and methodological tools. Once again the
current state of psychological science has been characterized as a crisis, despite the fact that it is already difficult to outline a crisis-free period in our science. Crisis or not, the problems in the construction of psychological theories and their verification have long been obvious, and many options for their solution have already been proposed . In their article, the authors consider three reasons they outline for why developing good psychological theories is so difficult, namely: the lack of constraints on theories from stable phenomena; problems of reliability of psychological constructs; barriers to discovering causal relationships between psychological variables.
Phenomena as constraints for theories.
"Constraint " is fundamental , not only its translation, but also how the authors themselves interpret it, since there are about two dozen versions of its use in English. Let's try to figure it out. The importance of the interpretation and translation of the word constrain emphasized above becomes obvious already from the subtitle and the first statement: "In this section we argue that the phenomenon of constrain is the development of theory in science, but in psychological science there is not enough knowledge about reliable phenomena to impose sufficient constraints" [ 7, With. 2]. If
we interpret constraints as a limitation, a statement with the verb constrain becomes more than controversial (phenomena limit the development of science...). It remains to be assumed that the authors mean something similar to constitution or structuring, although in this case the statement seems insufficiently thought out, since, as is known, theories not only describe phenomena, but also predict new ones (however, the authors mention this elsewhere). I come to the conclusion that the only more or less clear and consistent interpretation of the topic considered by the authors in this
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section of the article will be the following: phenomena (i.e., the corresponding phenomena) is not enough to
constitute the development of theory in science, but in determine which theory we should believe in the truth" ([ 7, p.
psychological science there are not enough firmly established 3]) it makes sense to comment. On the one hand, many
phenomena to serve as an empirical justification for theories. psychologists do not find this a problem, since they see the
Then it is difficult to disagree with this, although I do not essence and distinctive feature of psychology as an
share the position popular among psychologists, according to "understanding science", "working with meanings", etc. On the
which the situation in the natural sciences in this part is other hand, are there (are they possible) clear and
significantly better, since their subjects are much less complex unconditional criteria for proving a theory or measures of its
(I will return to this topic later). validity? I don't know of any of these, and many questions
The statement that in psychology "theories are remain regarding the methods of mathematical statistics, some
underdetermined by the evidence of the available evidence of which are discussed in the article under comment.
Psychological constructs and epistemic iteration.
The second reason considered by the authors is the lack of attention to improving and testing psychological constructs. And again there is a problem with the concept: construct and its derivatives are not specified for the reader. In particular, are there any substantive differences from the concepts of theoretical framework , system concepts or method . From the following text it becomes clear that the authors see the essence of the difficulty under consideration in terminological confusion, in an unjustified and unsystematic expansion of terminology. These phenomena in the
functioning of scientific knowledge have already been discussed many times in psychological publications and are subject to fair criticism. The article emphasizes the fruitfulness of assessing construct validity (the concept was introduced in 1955 in [ 1]). It is interesting that this concept is also undergoing meaningful changes, as noted: " its meaning has changed greatly and branched out in subsequent decades" [ 7, p. 3]. Further it is said that the construct must be embedded in a theoretical framework, and its measurement must be valid, that is, measure only what is
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necessary. It is difficult to disagree with this, although this requirement has already been emphasized many times in publications on the methodology of psychology, not to mention the fact that this requirement is part of the scientific method of cognition and its fulfillment is mandatory in the natural sciences.
Also a reference to the experience of natural science research is the example of the formation of concepts and classifications in them, which are constantly refined through further experiments and observations, as well as by improving the theoretical framework in which they are built. As a methodological guideline for organizing psychological research, the authors, with reference to the works of H. Chang [ 1], cite "epistemic iteration" - a process in which successive stages of cognition and iteration are implemented, each of which is based on the previous one and contributes to the achievement of set epistemic goals. Hardly anyone doubts the importance of this methodological technique (adjusted for the fact that the trajectories of scientific research are not always so straightforward), but there is also no substantive novelty in this either. And the introduction of new terms (in particular, epistemic iteration ) for known phenomena
contributes to an unjustified and unsystematic expansion of terminology, which the authors themselves oppose.
The article provides, in my opinion, one of the convincing reasons that concepts in psychology are not being improved. Namely, that sufficiently developed concepts - which have other concepts, theories and practices dependent on it - become ingrained. They can no longer be improved, even if they are known to be imperfect, since changing such a concept could destroy the structures that depend on it. And this is associated not only with theoretical problems, but also with a variety of undesirable cultural consequences.
I will also note that despite all the not unfounded criticism of the methods of the natural sciences and the desire to justify distancing themselves from them in theoretical and methodological research, psychologists continue to focus on the experience of their development and functioning.
Despite all the not unfounded criticism of the methods of the natural sciences and the desire to justify distancing themselves from them in theoretical and methodological research, psychologists continue to focus on the experience of their development and functioning.
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Psychological theories and the problem of finding causes
In this part of the article, the authors touched upon another problematic component of psychological research -establishing cause-and-effect relationships between phenomena. From the trivial statement that finding psychological causes is extremely difficult, the authors move on to considering the "interventionist theory of causation" [ 8] , which essentially reproduces long-known logical and philosophical principles about causes and effects, but again in a new terminological "packaging" " Once again, we have to come to terms with this and agree with the fair criticism of the
correlation method of establishing the causes of psychological phenomena, but no solution to the problem has been proposed. Of course, the authors are correct that the problem with interventions on psychological variables is that they tend to be "crude" in that they change not just one target variable but several others as well. But what next? The schematism of the "interventionist" or any other "causal theory" is clear, but how to apply it in the conditions of psychological measurement remains unclear, as before.
Discussion
The final section of the commented article promises recommendations for psychological research based on the provisions discussed in the article. True, they rather puzzled me than clarified anything. In particular, the authors' support for the calls discussed in scientific publications to discover new phenomena and collect more reliable evidence for those already discovered is difficult to accept as a recommendation. Moreover, the call itself is puzzling - as if the study of phenomena and their research is
a separate area of psychology, which has received insufficient attention. It is unlikely that any psychologist doubts the importance of the discovery of new phenomena, since this has always been one of the tasks of scientific knowledge, especially since in science it is not so much the phenomena that are important as the patterns of their manifestations. I find it controversial to say that "phenomena-based research" is possible in scientific psychology and that "phenomena can also be extremely important for science and society as such."
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This can be objected to by the fact that human perception (including "phenomena") is controlled by cognitive processes and existing knowledge about the world. That is, the selection of certain psychological phenomena from a variety of phenomena occurs on the basis of the scientific and ideological guidelines of the observer. And for this reason scientific phenomena "by themselves" are not possible. And in general, it is difficult to imagine the formulation of a scientific task to search for or collect phenomena .
The second recommendation concerns the question of whether we should strive to make psychological theories more mathematical or more formal . Again, the argument is made that none of the problems of psychological science can be solved by formalizing psychological theories , and many successful theories in the life sciences are not formalized or mathematical theories. However, the use of complex statistical and computational models does not make psychology more scientific and may even be counterproductive if the conceptual and empirical basis (e.g., robust phenomena) is not yet firmly established. One can agree with both judgments as statements of facts. But I don't see any recommendations in them.
The last passage emphasizes the importance of having clearly and transparently defined concepts as the basis for
theories, which is not the same as formalizing theories. The authors write that concepts that must be "well defined" (?) and well-formulated theories (?) are needed. That is, based on the crisis, in the opinion of the authors, the position of psychology, existing theories and concepts are not well defined and formulated insufficiently qualitatively. We can agree with this, but dozens of researchers, including those deeply respected in science, have already pointed this out. There is no novelty in this, and the recommendation to "strive for..." even in this case seems unproductive.
The article concludes with an appeal, of course, to the "most fundamental factor" of the crisis in psychology, which is that the very subject of psychology makes it very difficult to develop good theories. As if other components of the universe are less complex for scientific understanding, yet physicists, astronomers, cosmologists, chemists, biologists, geologists, etc. do not complain about the complexity of the subjects of their research.
Despite the fact that in his numerous theoretical and methodological publications G. A. Ball also often reproduced the thesis about the complexity of the subject of psychology in relation to the subjects of the natural sciences, however, since the 1970s he has been developing the idea of "increasing
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the scientific nature" of psychology, including through the use of methodological tools formalized sciences [ 3]. He examined in detail and in many ways the advantages of formalized means and the specifics of their use in psychology, substantiated the importance of theoretical developments on the basis of the most clearly defined conceptual systems possible - something that many psychologists write about today, in particular, in the article under comment. At the same time, he made constructive proposals for improving psychological knowledge in its individual components, and also developed a number of methodological approaches that implement the principles of constructing scientific knowledge - more consistent and clear than those mastered in psychology (the most perfect version is presented, in particular, in 1]). As a colleague and co-author of Georgiy Alekseevich, of course, in the work being commented upon, the above points are primarily visible, but in my publications I reviewed and analyzed the methodological innovations proposed by many world psychologists, especially in line with the issues of integration of psychological knowledge, to which Georgiy Alekseevich and I came close in the last period of his scientific work. Unfortunately, all these studies, like many other works of Soviet theorists and methodologists, continue to remain unknown to foreign psychologists.
As I noted above, for Western psychological thought the issues discussed in the article under comment are far from new. But then, as the compiler of the collection (and the translator of this article), a reasonable question may be asked: why is this article presented in the collection? There are several reasons for this. Firstly, texts on the theory and methodology of psychology, published under license from Creanive Common (that is, free distribution), extremely small. Secondly, be that as it may, the article was written by real specialists who deal with methodological issues in psychology. Thirdly, taking into account the first, the article is useful as a digest of theoretical and methodological research and discussions in Western psychology, since our ability to familiarize ourselves with them in the original is significantly limited. As for the target reader of the commented article in the West, I will assume that the article is intended not for theorists and methodologists, but for psychologists of other specializations, in order to draw their attention to that part of psychological knowledge with which they are very little familiar. Therefore, the calls I criticize in this commentary are apparently addressed precisely to this part of the psychological community. And with such addressing there is a reason for them.
But on the merits of the theoretical problems considered, I can only draw one conclusion: colleagues, we are marking time.
Теоретичш дослщження у психологи. Том 21 • 2024
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