"Perhaps the easiest way to convince yourself is by scanning the literature of soft psychology over the last 30 years and noticing what happens to theories. Most of them suffer the fate that General MacArthur ascribed to old generals—They never die, they just slowly fade away. In the developed sciences, theories tend either to become widely accepted and built into the larger edifice of well-tested human knowledge or else they suffer destruction in the face of recalcitrant facts and are abandoned, perhaps regretfully as a “nice try.” But in fields like personology and social psychology, this seems not to happen. There is a period of enthusiasm about a new theory, a period of attempted application to several fact domains, a period of disillusionment as the negative data come in, a growing bafflement about inconsistent and unreplicable empirical results, multiple resort to ad hoc excuses, and then finally people just sort of lose interest in the thing and pursue other endeavors."
React to this quote
Resonant Thoughts
"We knew nothing but despotism. That is why the very rich Mughal empire could break up into nothing. Turn to dust at the merest touch of a foreign power. There was no institution, there was no creative…"
"The thing that distinguishes social systems from physical or even biological systems is their incomparable richness in special cases. Generalizations in the social sciences are mere pathways which lea…"
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"File of Cuza's "The Science of Anti-Semitism" article in English on the Internet Archive"
— A.C. Cuza"Architecture is defined as the art and science of creating buildings. Systems engineering may be similarly …"
— Derek Hitchins"is not proven, it's not science. It's more of a religion than a science...Everything that might result from…"
— Steve King"The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predicti…"
— Stephen Hawking"Managers try to make the workplace safer and less destructive of a precious capital: labour. Animal exploit…"
— Gilles Dauvé"It is necessary to guard against a possible danger... of submitting too readily to the result of a so-calle…"
— J. R. Partington
