A recent commentary of mine on a target article in Theory & Psychology (2024, 34, 585-509) challenges the recommendation that psychology should abandon Popper’s philosophy of critical rationalism and adopt Roy Bhaskar’s critical realist philosophy of science. doi.org/10.1177/0959...

🧵 1/2 New open access paper:
First soup-to-nuts description of my explanation-focused view of test validity.
A dialectic on validity: Explanation-focused and the many ways of being human. “International Journal of Assessment Tools in Education,” vol. 10, pp. 1-96. doi.org/10.21449/ija...

A recent commentary of mine on a target article in Psychological Inquiry by De Boeck, et al. (2023, 34, 261-266) makes use of selected historical and epistemological scholarship in order to correct some common misunderstandings of three major behaviorist psychologists. I argue for the following: 1/

Edward Tolman’s purposive behaviorism, and its attendant idea of cognitive maps, is best understood as a realist interpretation of cognitive learning theory that was an influential forerunner of modern cognitive psychology. It was not an empiricist precursor to it. 2/

Clark Hull was a realist from the outset who took theoretical terms, such as ‘habit strength’, to designate causal mechanisms, which comprised part of the internal structure of the organism. 3/

Plausibly, B. F. Skinner was not a twentieth century (anti-realist) positivist empiricist, but a nonrealist, who was skeptical about the value of deep-running cognitive theories in his time, but open to increasing degrees of realism with genuine advances in relevant scientific knowledge. 4/

Skinner’s value as a psychological theorist can be more fully appreciated by viewing elements of his work as comprising a coherent global theory, in addition to a theory of learning. As such, his theoretical work should be prized, despite its proscription of postulational theories. 5/

The relevant historical scholarship about behaviorism suggests a complex intertwining of different realist and nonrealist strands of thinking, and a view of the evolution of mid-twentieth century American psychology as theoretically pluralist, or multi-paradigmatic, in character. 6/

My article, 'Repositioning construct validity theory: From nomological networks to pragmatic theories, and their evaluation by explanatory means', is now available online, with open access, in Perspectives on Psychological Science. doi.org/10.1177/1745...