John Horgan ("In Defense of Common Sense," Op-Ed, Aug. 12) issues an impassioned call for the return of common sense in the evaluation of theories in psychology, neuroscience, physics and other scientific disciplines.
This chapter focuses on evaluation of theories.
This point of view, an exact formulation of which meets with great difficulties, has played an important role in the selection and evaluation of theories since time immemorial.
It can be difficult to see how this method allows for any philosophically critical evaluation of theories in the history of science – a kind of evaluation Cohen never shies away from.
The addition of neuroimaging techniques to language research has allowed independent evaluation of theories developed to explain the mechanisms responsible for this unique human activity.
Influential authors such as Thomas Kuhn (1962/1970) (but see Laudan 1990, 268, for a more extensive survey) relied on Duhemian insights to suggest that confirmation by empirical evidence is too weak a force to drive the evaluation of theories in science, often inviting conclusions of a relativistic flavor (see Worrall 1996 for an illuminating reconstruction along these lines).
The evaluation of theory-based exercise therapy programs can contribute to the further development of theoretical assumptions of the chronification process of clbp.
We agree with Head and Noar that, for theory testing, we need other systematically varied experimental designs than for the evaluation of theory-based interventions.
An emerging empirical literature on NIHR CLAHRCs has successfully applied the community of practice theory to the design and evaluation of theory-informed applied health research, illuminated the boundaries that exist between various professional and organisational groups, and explored ways to mobilise knowledge across such boundaries [ 13, 14, 22, 27].
This article provides a review of the literature on sexual revictimization among women, focusing on empirical evaluations of theories of revictimization.
