Social Psychology and the Pragmatic Conduct of Science
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We chart our agreements and disagreements with Wallach and Wallach's (2001) arguments. After listing some areas of agreement, we then make four arguments that undermine the Wallachs' project. First, we argue the discovery of `laws' is a goal neither of scientists nor of the discipline. Second, we suggest the Wallachs' claim that social psychological theories are infused with unfalsifiable theories about the nature of psychological variables misses the logical distinction between measurement models and conceptual hypotheses. Third, we look at the role that circularity plays in deductive logic and conclude that circularity is rarely a serious problem in practice. Fourth, we examine what effect bits of research have on scientific progress, and argue that `non-progressive' papers do not hinder progress. The best response to the Wallachs' concerns about social psychology is provided by a glance at progress within the field today. The state is very good; circularities, tautologies and untested assumptions do not pose a significant threat to progress in the science of social psychology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".