The Nature of Hypothetical Constructs

Abstract

So far in this book the word hypothetical construct has been used for a particular sort of theoretical concept which is found in psychology. Philosophers of science (for example, Geach and Black, 1970) maintain that words describing concepts should be different from the words describing the objects or entities to which the concepts refer. In this and later chapters entities as well as concepts in psychology will be examined. So, to make the concept-object distinction clear with respect to hypothetical constructs the form ‘hypothetical construct’ will now be used to denote the theoretical concept, and hypothetical construct to denote the theoretical entity.