Abstract
A recent discussion in this journal revolved around the issue of whether postulating internal clocks is harmful or beneficial to scientific psychology, and how. I argue that this and other discussions on the topic have yet to address the real problem: The concept of a hypothetical construct is unintelligible. Psychologists agree that all entities that constitute hypothetical constructs are unobservable, importantly different from observable entities, including overt behavior and its environment. The root issue at hand here, then, is the observable-unobservable distinction. Psychologists have implicitly but erroneously taken it for granted as sufficiently unproblematic to warrant meaningful discussions based on it, when in fact it is a pernicious untenable remnant of logical positivism. All previous discussions of hypothetical constructs in psychology have overlooked arguments against this view in the philosophy of science. These arguments are sufficiently compelling to at least question, if not cease altogether, talk of observability, unobservability, and HCs in psychology as useless, even harmful.
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Notes
This characterization raises an important clarification. Movement-produced stimulus, goal response, drive, afferent neural interaction, anxiety, biophysical trait, regnancy, personality, unconscious, and internal clock per se are terms, not statements (an elementary distinction in logic). If HCs are statements, those terms do not designate HCs. Rather, hypothetical constructs would be statements that assert something hypothesized to be true about such entities and presupposes or entails their existence (hence the expression “existential hypotheses”), typically what they are (e.g., “an internal clock is a mechanism that organizes and predicts time by inducing a rhythm,” “personality is the set of all mental states that make a human being unique,” and “anxiety is a vague unpleasant emotional state with qualities of apprehension.” Interpreted in terms of the received view of scientific theories, HC qualify as theoretical statements (assertions whose nonlogical terms are all theoretical). On this basis, and in the interest of clarity, I will not speak of terms or concepts as being but rather as constituting HCs qua statements.
Calling P ‘observable’ was a technical slip clarified in later writings: In its final form, OUD was about extralinguistic entities, while predicates are linguistic, in which case it is more precise to qualify P here as observational instead of observable. Theoretical predicates, in contrast, refer to unobservable entities.
Some could reply that the inference itself is possible thanks to the supposed ‘observability’ of barpressing, but not only is this is a very different claim. It also is far from clear how to justify it. The claim that past barpressings are ‘observable’ is trivially true, as they presumably have been ‘observed.’ But what of predictions that future barpressings will be ‘observable’? How to justify them nontrivially and non-circularly? What do they even mean? How do they improve predictions of barpressing and other behaviors? No obvious answers present themselves.
Realists have no problem with this, as their view does not stop them from embracing counterfactual truths interpreted according to a possible-world semantics.
Monton & van Fraassen’s (2003) concluding remark is quite telling: “Even if some constructive empiricist were to embrace modal realism—and therefore at least one bit of what van Fraassen counts as inflationary metaphysics—she could still argue that constructive empiricism makes better sense of science than realism does” (p. 421). Anti-metaphysics is not that strong in constructive empiricism, after all. If they are open to the objective existence of possible worlds, why not do the same with atoms and electrons?
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Burgos, J.E. The Real Problem with Hypothetical Constructs. Perspect Behav Sci 44, 683–704 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-021-00311-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-021-00311-0