Varieties of Theorizing and the Project of Psychology

Abstract

There are two kinds of explanation in the natural sciences. In one we attempt to create a representation of the unobservable processes and structures that are responsible for phenomena, the strong sense of explanation, and in the other we formalize a description of the phenomena in question. Only the latter type of explanation was considered legitimate by positivists. In psychology there are already in existence a variety of psychologies used by people in different cultures to manage their lives. We have a variety of symbolic systems. Can we develop explanations in the second sense? We can start with the informal representation of the psychological bases of normative behaviour in sets of rules. But this tempting metaphor can be interpreted in three different ways. Rules can serve as instructions, as representations of unexpressed social conventions only immanent in what people do, or they can be a way of describing `good' habits. Using rule hypotheses to give explanations in the strong sense can mimic only the case of good habits.