The Importance of Theory

This piece, Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One on the Notes From Two Scientific Psychologists blog got my attention in three areas.

First, it is (sadly) a thorough and succinct statement of everything that my original field is struggling with. We don't have a baseline theory, and without one we can only argue from different viewpoints.

In my working field, W. Edwards Deming famously said (or is famously misquoted as saying?) "Without theory, there can be no experience." What me means (I think) is that unless you have a thorough baseline, you can only observe and react. No experience, no learning can be gained because learning and experience result from something in discord with what we believe. No belief, no discord, no experience, no learning.

The third area is that this article is a really good primer on what "science" is all about, and how the scientific method actually works to structure our advance of knowledge.

Without that thinking, you couldn't be reading this at all, unless I had handed you a clay tablet with the words scratched on it. All of our technology is built on the structured accumulation of knowledge. Without a baseline of theory, everything is as "right" as everything else. And that is the problem today - the attack on science we see in the media, from both the left and right wings of the political spectrum, is built on that fundamental premise.