Abstract
This chapter considers near-term possible paths for psychological research without statistical inference, before going on the deeper obstacles to change, including our attachment to rules. These include, on the one hand, a desperate denial of the subject, in pursuit of objectivity, and, on the other, frantic attempts at control, at assertion of the subject. Our only accredited methods are epidemiological, yet we know that psychological and biological processes don’t operate on random aggregates, but individuals. Our contemporary approach is biomedical research without a biomedical model. When physicists construct a linear plot of, say, solubility as a function of temperature, it is because physical theory predicts a linear relationship across the specified range. But when psychologists plot physical symptoms against depression, there is no psychological theory which says that these measurements should exhibit a linear relationship across different individuals; and the resulting plot exhibits almost nothing but error. Bill Powers (Behavior: The control of perception. Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1973; Psychological Review, 85:417–435, 1978) has developed a psychological theory based on individuals, which reconciles the concepts of mechanism and purpose; and the chapter concludes with a brief overview of his Perceptual Control Theory, as an indication of how the science of psychology might intelligently proceed.
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Notes
- 1.
IIt is ironic, and perhaps inevitable to retrospect, that two of the most recent attempts to grapple with the concept of statistical inference have essentially struggled, with different degrees of formality, to rehabilitate Fisher (Mayo, 2018; Weisberg, 2014). Although their approaches can boast a match with everyday usage, I cannot see that they have succeeded in overcoming the incoherence of the concepts of probability and statistical inference.
- 2.
I am indebted to Michel Accad for the reference.
- 3.
So did Richard Nelson, but he subsequently recanted his views, and so was not awarded the Nobel Prize with Arrow (Kealey, 2021).
- 4.
At the time, Paul Samuelson, in his textbook Economics (1964), included a graph showing that, due to its higher growth rate, the Soviet economy would overtake the U.S. economy by 1970. In subsequent editions, the intersection point was moved farther into the future, until the graph was dropped altogether (Skousen, 1997).
- 5.
Park, Marascuilo, and Gaylord-Ross (1990) compared visual inspection by professional behavior analysts with randomization tests for an AB design, with somewhat inconclusive results. As with clinical versus statistical prediction, the comparison was somewhat unfair, in that judges did not have the full context of information that would normally be available to them. Agreement between judges and the significance tests was better than chance (evidently a real question in this case), though the judges were more conservative.
- 6.
Sedlmeier and Gigerenzer (1989) reported that the power of psychological studies remained unchanged in the 25 years after Cohen’s article was published, the increase in sample sizes having been canceled exactly by the practice of adjusting α levels for multiple comparisons.
- 7.
Verification, in contrast to what the name suggests, is not a process of making true, but of making sure, and hence is not so much something we do to our hypotheses, as something we do to ourselves. It amounts, in one way or another, to looking to see that what we have seen before can be seen again; and a method, once identified, can be used repetitively, until we are satisfied. Discovery, on the other hand, is seeing something for the first time. Rules for discovery are thus hard to come by, because they can only be used once; then they are no longer rules for discovery. Methods for discovery elude specification, moreover, because the requisite attitude is one of receptivity to inspiration; if we followed a rule, we would not call what happened an inspiration, or the result a discovery.
In these terms, the distinction is familiar enough, but it can very easily be overdrawn (Feyerabend, 1975). The processes of discovery and verification may best be thought of, perhaps, as marking more or less incidentally two complementary aspects of ongoing inquiry. The phase of verification represents the formalizable aspect of scientific inquiry and rule-following activity; the process of discovery is unformalizable and represents, as it were, the rule-breaking aspect. Both processes go on in alternation, almost concurrently. To find the distinction actually becoming sharp in practice, Feyerabend suggests, is indicative of a temporary stasis in research; we might go on to say that our tendency to find the sharp distinction plausible is indicative, perhaps, of the static quality of our conception of research.
- 8.
It is commonly observed that, of the psychologists who would be on almost anyone’s short list of “greats,” most are Europeans who were working before World War II (and the subsequent importation of American research methodology), and none of them relied on existing formal methodology. Skinner may be the American most likely to make such a list, but he had as little use for statistical inference as Piaget.
Such work is sometimes belittled on the ground that, without statistical inference, it remains speculative (and therefore, presumably, valueless). Freudian theory, in particular, has been charged, with some justification, with invulnerability. But if a theory is susceptible to correction, then it is still saying something. I am not thinking of the silly studies by American psychologists claiming to “refute” Piaget by showing that American children lag far behind the Swiss in their cognitive development; I am thinking of such work as Gilligan’s (1982) critique of Kohlberg’s (1969) theory, and the Dreyfuses’ more profound critique of both of them (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1992).
- 9.
I am aware that the Buddhist concept of empty self is regarded as a kind of ideal of mental and philosophical health (e.g., Rosenbaum & Dyckman, 1995; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), and I don’t necessarily disagree with their view. I see it as a privileged position, however, of those who have already constructed a secure self and world, and then have the luxury of playing with alternative constructions. Otherwise, the rhetoric of empty selves can make it sound as though multiple personality disorders were the epitome of enlightenment.
There is also ambiguity in the scope of the concept of self in this literature. The experience of taking different “selves”—i.e., roles—in different social contexts is familiar enough; but if people respond to us as though we were literally different selves, then we are apt to feel simply misunderstood, unseen.
In comparison with the exalted concepts of Buddhism, my own headings Empty Self and Empty World are somewhat overblown, referring to something more like a garden-variety cultural neurosis.
- 10.
As was noted in Chap. 2, the greater self-world differentiation implicit in the new status of language in the seventeenth century led to a more objective use of language, for representation. As Foucault (1973) observes, the functions of language at that time split, so that more expressive uses have since been relegated to literature, to poetry, and dispatched from science, from knowledge. The split is less thoroughgoing than the others discussed here, with scientific discourse reaching only a modest pinnacle in the approved journalese of what in psychology is ironically called “the literature.” One reason is presumably that it is still too hard to talk like Bertrand Russell in the Principia Mathematica; we are too obviously dependent on ordinary language to succeed in suppressing it—at least until a Fisher of words is forthcoming.
- 11.
See Branden (1969) for a discussion of the latter need, which he calls the visibility principle. (In David Witter’s formulation: “I’ll show you yours if you’ll show me mine.”) It is characteristic of Branden’s rationalism (at least at that time), I am inclined to say, that he would have grasped the fundamentality of the need for psychological visibility while overlooking what one would think was the more obvious need for physical visibility. The need to see and be seen as physical entities, which has been correspondingly frustrated by our culture for about the same period, would appear to have been grasped implicitly by nudists—many of whom, however, remain caught up in issues of social acceptability in our present cultural context and whose articulation of the principles involved remains therefore disappointingly muddled.
- 12.
The actual transformation of society was hardly achieved instantaneously, of course. The atomistic social philosophy of Locke was ultimately realized not so much stipulatively through the U.S. Constitution as practically through technology: The telephone and the airplane, in particular, drastically weakened traditional ties—to place, to family, and to the community—in allowing us to relocate across distances we previously would not have considered.
- 13.
It may be apropos to recall that research comes from the Latin word circus, meaning circle. The related verb circare meant to go around or to go about; French softened it to chercher, and it is from chercher and rechercher that we get our English search and research (Partridge, 1966). Hence to research literally means to keep going around in circles.
- 14.
Pirsig’s (1974) concept of Quality as the cutting edge of consciousness makes a similar plea for accommodation to the object. The eloquence and power of his exposition derives partly from his provocative application of the concept to motorcycle maintenance. If the idea of making ourselves one with a machine is daunting to some, sensitive attunement to another person is no less delicate a task for others. Whichever comes more easily will depend on whether we grew up more like a person or a motorcycle.
- 15.
I am indebted to Jürgen Kremer (1993) for this apt term.
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Acree, M.C. (2021). Conclusions and the Future of Psychological Research. In: The Myth of Statistical Inference. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73257-8_11
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