Between the analytic and the arbitrary: A case study of psychological research

It is argued that psychological theories must be seen as attempts to explicate the conceptual network embedded in ordinary language and that psychological data must be seen as historically constituted. Hence, psychological theory is regarded as, potentially, a system of logically necessary (analytic) theorems, analogous to, e. g., Euclidean geometry, and psychological data are seen as determined by the historical (arbitrary) circumstances that happen to prevail. An instance of published psychological research is shown to contain many unrecognized analytic and arbitrary elements. Its pretensions to generality are contradicted by its highly situation- and culture-bound assumptions, and its pretensions to being empirical are contradicted by the prevalence of necessarily true and necessarily false assumptions. The level of theoretical precision is seen as very low.