Comparing Theories with the Ising Model of Explanatory Coherence

Abstract

Theories are among the most important tools of science. Lewin (1943) already noted “[t]here is nothing as practical as a good theory”. Although psychologists discussed problems of theory in their discipline for a long time, weak theories are still widespread in most subfields. One possible reason for this is that psychologists lack the tools to systematically assess the quality of their theories. Thagard (1989) developed a computational model for formal theory evaluation based on the concept of explanatory coherence. However, there are possible improvements to Thagard’s (1989) model and it is not available in software that psychologists typically use. Therefore, we developed a new implementation of explanatory coherence based on the Ising model. We demonstrate the capabilities of this new Ising Model of Explanatory Coherence (IMEC) on several examples from psychology and other sciences. It is also available in the R-package IMEC so that it can help scientists to evaluate the quality of their theories in practice.

Productive Explanation: A Framework for Evaluating Explanations in Psychological Science

“…It is especially interesting to connect our production-based account of explanation to Thagard's 1988 explanatory coherence. Notably, an implementation of explanatory coherence as an Ising model has recently been developed (Maier, van Dongen, & Borsboom, 2021).…”

One Step Closer Towards Responsible Research Assessment in Psychology: Evaluation and Testing of a New Tool in Practice

“…While the methods and statistical analysis, whether theories were tested or integrated and how innovative a paper is will be discussed in detail among other aspects in phase two, it is hard to formalize those topics and reduce them to an indicator which could be used in phase one already. One idea (suggested by a participant) to formalize how good a theory in a given paper is could be a new systematic approach developed by Maier et al (2023) called the "Ising model of Explanatory Coherence" to evaluate scientific theory. They also developed an R-package (IMEC) that assists scientists in evaluating the quality of their theories.…”

A Critical Evaluation of Theories and Their Empirical Testing Methods

“…The role of psychological theories is to provide explanations for a phenomenon (Borsboom et al, 2021;Fried, 2020;Van Dongen et al, 2022). According to meta-researchers, however, it is essential that the phenomenon, i.e., the empirical, stable, and generalizable pattern in the world, is identified before constructing the theory (Eronen, 2020;Fried, 2020;Maier et al, 2021). Furthermore, it is important that part of the work to identify and define the phenomenon involves a consideration for the complexity of the phenomenon (Fried, 2020;Godfrey-Smith, 2007;Haslbeck et al, 2021).…”

“…The goal of psychological theories is to better understand, predict, and modify processes in the real world (Borsboom et al, 2021;Fried, 2020;Van Dongen et al, 2022). In psychology, theories are typically verbal descriptions of the phenomenon (sometimes called proto-theories but hereafter referred to as verbal theories ;Fried, 2020;Haslbeck et al, 2021;Maier et al, 2021), which is also the case for all well-known verbal theories of dyadic interactions (e.g., social exchange theory, social learning theory, interdependence theory, intimacy process theory, social cognitive model, stress and coping model).…”

“…For example, in the traditional research paradigm, results based on observational data are not interpreted causally (Grosz et al, 2020;Hernán, 2018;Rohrer, 2018). According to meta-researchers, this leads to incoherence: the presence or absence of a causal relationship between variables in a verbal theory may never be explicitly tested within the current research paradigm (Eronen, 2020;Fried, 2020;Grosz et al, 2020;Hernán, 2018;Maier et al, 2021;Pearl, 2009;Rohrer, 2018;Rohrer et al, 2021;Scheel, 2022).…”