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Two Factors Contributing to the Perception of the Theoretical Intractability of Social Psychology

University of New Mexico

The main reason for suspecting that transhistorical validity may be more difficult to achieve for social than for physical theories is that incorporating enlightenment effects into social theories may lead to an infinite regress. Such infinite regresses are not an uncommon problem in science, however, and effective strategies for dealing with them have been developed. Unfamiliarity with such strategies is but one manifestation of our field's failure to model two crucial lessons from several centuries' experience with the physical sciences: the need for formally stated theories and the need to distinguish between the success of a theory in highly com plex applied settings and the validity of that theory as established in more tightly controlled situations.

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