What Makes a Good Theory?
How Do We Make a Theory Good?

Rob Davies

We are learning how to think critically for ourselves

Active learning works best even if it sometimes feel challenging

  • Active learning is what you do when you ask or answer questions
  • We will prompt you sometimes with Activate

Activate

What theory is most relevant to your interests?

  • How do you know it is a theory?
  • What makes it a good theory?

What we are going to do

People talk about theories all the time:

  • We are supposed to work with theories to understand human nature

    • We say that this is what we we are doing
    • But is it?

  • This discussion is designed to help us to think clearly

Reading

We borrow the title of the lecture from Olivia Guest’s very helpful article (Guest, 2024)

Why we need to talk about theories

  1. We may or may not be interested in:
  • Science or Psychological Science
  • Being a scientist or doing research
  1. We will be interested in using the products of science (the evidence, the insights) in everyday life or in professional practice

Why we need to talk about theories

We need to do this here and now because, typically, we will not have done it before and this neglect causes problems (Proulx & Morey, 2021; Scheel et al., 2021; van Rooij, 2022):

  • Excess focus on reporting effects or results without insight
  • Claims about things as theories (that are not theories)
  • Reports of weak tests of theory that look good but are unhelpful

Reading

Critical discussion usually builds on Meehl: we discussed Meehl (1990)’s ideas, previously, see also Meehl (1967) and Meehl (1978)

Why this will be useful: for life

The evidence or the insights that psychologists produce when they do research often come to us, in everyday life, framed in terms of ideas about people and the things we can do:

  • Ideas about learning, memory, and cognition
  • Ideas about development and individual differences
  • Ideas about personality and social processes
  • Ideas about the links between brain and cognition

These ideas are often (we will see: not always) constructed as theories

Why this will be useful: for students

  • Graduates of social or psychological science typically (Proulx & Morey, 2021; Scheel et al., 2021; van Rooij, 2022) train to:

    • Identify a hypothesis
    • Construct a study to test the hypothesis
    • Collect and analyze data to do the test

  • We talk about theories in psychological science but do not typically consider (1.) what makes the things we talk about theories or (2.) what makes them good or bad

  • This is why “Demonstrate critical reflection” is hard

Why this will be challenging

This will be challenging because

  1. This work will be new
  • If we have not considered what makes a thing a theory or what makes a theory good before, it will be harder to get started (it will get easier)
  1. We will need to be watchful
  • People sometimes talk about theories when the things they talk about are not theories
  • People don’t always talk accurately, reliably, in good faith

How we will do this

  1. What theories are and do
  2. Why talking about this stuff is useful
  3. How we can build or develop theories
  4. What Makes a Good Theory, and How Do We Make a Theory Good?

How we will do this

Discussions of theory can get abstract so I will refer to examples to make the discussion concrete

Reading

My examples are based on theory development in research on reading development, dyslexia, and cognitive reading processes in skilled readers

What is a good theory? What makes a theory good?

Activate

Think about the psychological science you have read about and are interested in:

  • Can you identify a theory in that topic area?
  • Where or how is that theory presented or stated?

What theories are and do

To begin our work, we look at some ways that critical thinkers have identified what a theory is and what it does

  • We don’t need to be too careful here
  • We want to identify some features

What theories are and do

This definition is compact but does a lot of useful work for us (Guest, 2024; referencing Guest & Martin, 2021):

A theory is a scientific proposition — described by a collection of natural-language sentences, mathematics, logic, and figures — that introduces causal relations with the aim of describing, explaining, and/or predicting a set of phenomena

What does theory look like? Targets

Guest (2024):

a collection of natural-language sentences

Seidenberg & McClelland (1989)’s targets:

  1. Theory about recognition and pronunciation of words
  2. Skilled readers identify words quickly, activating knowledge about spellings (orthography), meanings (semantics) and sounds (phonology)
  3. Beginning readers must acquire these skills: this can be difficult for some children (developmental dyslexia)
  4. Deficits in these skills can appear after brain injury (acquired dyslexia)

Assumptions

Guest (2024):

a collection of natural-language sentences

Seidenberg & McClelland (1989)’s core assumptions:

… reading words involves the computation of three types of codes: orthographic, phonological, and semantic.

Each of these codes is … distributed …

Processing in the model is … interactive …

… [and] mediated by connections among the units.

What does theory look like?

Guest (2024):

A theory is … figures

Figure 1: Seidenberg & McClelland (1989)’s general framework

What theories are and do

Key ideas

When we are looking for the presentation of a theory, we are typically looking for statements identifying:

  1. A set of phenomena to be explained
  2. A causal mechanism that explains how or why these phenomena occur

What theories are and do

Guest (2024):

A theory is a scientific proposition — described by a collection of natural-language sentences, mathematics, logic, and figures — that introduces causal relations with the aim of describing, explaining, and/or predicting a set of phenomena

where

Phenomenon is a process that generates, or requires, observations, constituting scientists’ perspective on what things appear or seem to be, not how they are.

What does theory look like? Phenomena

Guest (2024):

… describing, explaining, and/or predicting a set of phenomena

Seidenberg & McClelland (1989) target phenomena that are observed if we ask adults to read words aloud:

  1. In English, the pronunciations of many words is rule-governed but there are exceptions to the rules (compare: regular /gave, pave/ versus exception /have/)
  2. Reading aloud exception words is harder than reading regular words
  3. This difference is observed to be small in skilled readers’ responses
  4. If both exception words and regular words are common in experience (high frequency)

What does theory look like? Causal explanations

Guest (2024):

… causal relations

Seidenberg & McClelland (1989)’s causal explanation:

  1. Effects like the moderation of the regularity effect by word frequency result
  2. In a system comprising a distributed network in which
  3. knowledge is encoded through the gradual adaptation of network structure (connection weights) in response to learning experiences
  4. where spelling-sound regularity and word frequency are both statistical regularities in the learning environment

What theories are: where and how they are presented

  1. In practice, in our reading, we may be looking for presentations of theory in a journal article (e.g., Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989 appears in Psychological Review)
  2. We may find that there are multiple versions of a theory (Plaut et al., 1996; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989)
  3. The theory varies over time or to target different phenomena (Harm & Seidenberg, 1999; Harm & Seidenberg, 2004)
  4. The theory has competitors with overlapping or distinct targets (e.g., Coltheart et al., 2001)

Theories, families, and phenomena

Figure 2: Theories and families of theories, as theoretical positions, mapped onto the phenomena they address (adapted from Guest (2024), Figure 1)

Theories, families, and phenomena

In reading and writing about psychology, we may need to map (Guest, 2024):

  1. Where we find statements of theory
  2. What causal relations the theory assumes to explain what phenomena
  3. How theories may be grouped into families or fields, where there are multiple theories
  4. How a theory relates to other (competing or complementary) theories
Figure 3: Theories and families of theories, as theoretical positions, mapped onto the phenomena they address (adapted from Guest (2024), Figure 1)

Genealogy, contests, competition

In some fields of Psychology, where theories are well-developed we see the relationship between theories discussed explicitly

  • Seidenberg & McClelland (1989) explain the precursors for their account, tracing its family tree back to the work of the PDP group in the 1980s (e.g. Rumelhart et al., 1986)
  • They take care to explain how their theory is different from alternate accounts (e.g. Morton, 1969)
  • They review how different versions of their theory can be grouped together by common principles (Seidenberg & Plaut, 2006)

What theories are and do

Activate

Think about the psychological science you have read about and are interested in:

  • Can you identify different theories in your topic area?

    • Where are the different theories presented?
    • How can you tell that the theories are different

  • Are different presentations actually presentations of different versions of the same theory or presentations of competing theories?

Why talking about this stuff is useful

Why are we bothering to think or talk about this stuff? Isn’t it obvious? Is it worth the effort?

Why talking about this stuff is useful

  1. Psychologists often do not know what theories are, or say things are theories when they are not
  2. Critical thinkers trace the roots of recent crises back through this amnesia about what theories are or do
  3. To a blindspot in our education and training

How do we know there is a problem?

How do we know there is a problem?

One way we can tell there is a problem is that it is often difficult to identify the key analysis in published papers:

  • Students trying to replicate studies could not identify the key statistical for a study (Hawkins et al., 2018)
  • Attempts to review literatures found it hard to identify which test results inform which hypotheses and how results affect authors’ conclusions (Scheel, 2022)

Multiverses: the specification problem

You may remember that, following Meehl (1990), we discussed how to get to a prediction we can test we need:

  • A psychological theory about a process or a thing
  • Auxiliary assumptions that gets us from the process or thing to what we can observe
  • A specific account of what exactly we are predicting: is the behaviour going to increase or decrease, and by how much?

Multiverses: the specification problem

Multiverse analyses suggest estimates of psychological effects (phenomena) vary (Silberzahn & Uhlmann, 2015)

Silberzahn & Uhlmann (2015): Variation in effects estimates by different analysis teams

Multiverses: the specification problem

But Auspurg & Brüderl (2021) argue this happens when researchers don’t knoww how to interpret the research question

Silberzahn & Uhlmann (2015): Variation in effects estimates by different analysis teams

What is the problem? Theoretical amnesia

Borsboom (2026) argues that what has been going on looks like theoretical amnesia: we teach our students or learn how to

  1. Form a hypothesis
  2. Design a study to test the hypothesis
  3. Collect the data and conduct the analysis to do the test
  4. Write a narrative report of the test results

What is the problem? Theoretical amnesia

Borsboom (2026) argues that what has been going on looks like theoretical amnesia: we do not teach or learn how to

  1. Build theories
  2. Evaluate theories

What is the problem? Theoretical amnesia

Borsboom (2026): this is why

psychology is so hyper-ultra-mega empirical.

We so often see papers that wrap a narrative story about the things people are or do around some statistical test results

Theories and theory-like objects

  • van Rooij (2022) points out that sometimes there are things that we call theories even though they are not theories

Theories and not theories

Theories:

Theories and theory-like objects

Theories and not theories

Theories are not (Devezer, 2024; Fried, 2020; Gigerenzer, 1998; van Rooij, 2022):

  • Stories or narratives we might use to describe what we are thinking about
  • An acronym or collection of words or a one-word explanation
  • A statistical model or data description or summary

The theory is not the hypothesis is not the statistical test result

It will help you to keep these things separate

  • Theories are accounts of people and the things we do
  • Hypotheses are based on theories, stated as predictions about how we vary
  • Test results are aimed at hypotheses, based on observations about how people vary

The theory is not the hypothesis is not the statistical test result

Figure 4: Different theories can imply the same process, and different processes can imply the same statistical test result

Why talking about this stuff is useful

Activate

Think about the psychological science you are interested in:

  • Can you identify critical evaluations, in your readings, about the state of theory in your topic area?
  • What do people talk about when they talk about (good or bad) theories in the area?

How we can build theories

So: how do we do this? It will not surprise you to learn that

  1. It will (rightly*) be challenging
  2. Different thinkers have different ideas about how to best proceed

Tip

  • * rightly because people are complicated semi-random objects of study

Resolve the theory crisis by addressing the core challenges

Eronen & Bringmann (2021) argue developing good theories is difficult because:

  • We do not have sufficient knowledge of robust phenomena to impose constraints on what theories can or must explain
  • We do not, as a field, invest sufficient energy in improving and validating psychological constructs
  • Finding psychological causes is difficult because it is hard to enact manipulations selectively

If you could identify relevant phenomena robustly

Borsboom et al. (2021) identify a theory construction method:

  1. Identify relevant phenomena

    • targets for explanation

  2. Formulate a prototheory

    • from principles, come up with ideas to explain the phenomena

  3. Develop a formal model

    • capture the key ideas in equations or rules, so you can then construct simulations

If you could identify relevant phenomena robustly

  1. Check the adequacy of the formal model
  • Does a formal account of target phenomena match model-derived expectations?
  1. Evaluate the overall worth of the constructed theory
  • Deduce hypotheses for testing (Meehl, 1990)
  • Assess (1.) the breadth of phenomena the theory can explain and (2.) the economy (simplicity) of the explanation

Hold on: Focus on capacities

  • van Rooij & Baggio (2021): actually, no, psychologists spend too much effort looking for effects

  • We don’t need to build collections of robust effects before starting to build theories

  • Relevant effects are things we need to explain but they are secondary to our real targets:

    • We really need to focus on explaining our capacities for memory, language … which we know about already

Hold on: Focus on capacities

van Rooij & Baggio (2021):

  • The majority of possible effects will be irrelevant for the aims of theory building

    • How can we know which effects are relevant and informative and which ones are not?

  • We first need to build candidate theories so that we can determine which effects they imply

Work through levels of explanation

van Rooij & Baggio (2021) build on Marr (1982/2010) to help us to divide our work into:

  • levels of analysis
  1. Computational: what can we do?
  2. Algorithmic: what process could we use to do it?
  3. Implementational: how could the process be implemented?
Figure 5: Marr (1982/2010): three levels of analysis; here, adapted for thinking about reading

The utility of formal models

Guest & Martin (2021): formal models can drive theory development

  • Constructing a formal or computational model is helpful
  • Because it requires us to commit to, and to make explicit, our theoretical assumptions (compare: Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989)
Figure 6: Guest & Martin (2021) (adapted from Figure 2): theory-building hierarchy, from framework to the data used to test specific hypotheses

The utility of formal models

We progress step-by-step towards increasingly more specific ideas, each next step dependent on the previous step:

  • A theory introduces causal relations to describe or explain or predict a set of phenomena
  • To produce a specification, we suppose a plausible mechanism
  • An implementation will be an instantiation of a model of a candidate mechanisms
  • Given our model, we can generate hypotheses
  • Hypotheses are narrow testable statements about properties of the world
  • that can be measured and evaluated by collecting data and conducting analyses

How we can build or develop theories

Activate

Think about the psychological science you are interested in:

  • Can you find an account of the history of the development of theory in your topic area?
  • What are the next steps for theory development, in this area?

What Makes a Good Theory, and How Do We Make a Theory Good?

We reflect on examples of theory to learn how to identify (after Guest, 2024):

  • Theory virtues and virtuous theories
  • Theory vices and vicious theories

Guest (2024): Ontology of criteria for evaluating theory

  1. Metaphysical commitment

    • What parts of theory are not under investigation, but are assumed, asserted, or essential

  2. Discursive survival

    • Capacity to be understood by interested non-bad actors, to withstand scrutiny

Guest (2024): Ontology of criteria for evaluating theory

  1. Empirical interface

    • How observations relate to, and affect, theory and vice versa

  2. Minimising harm

    • Reckoning with the history or potential for harms

Theory virtues, theory vices

Scientists do theory evalution all the time but unconsciously:

  • we have our favourite theories, what we choose to spend time on
  • and we have theories we criticize, abandon or call pseudoscientific

Tip

An ontology can comprise a formal naming or definition of the categories or properties of, and the relations between, the things we want to talk about

  • Here, Guest (2024)’s ontology is helpful because distinguishing categories, properties and relations helps us to grasp the things (theories) we want to evaluate

Metaphysical commitment

Guest (2024):

  • What is the theory?
  • What causal relationships does the theory propose?
  • What does the theory assert?
  • In which field(s) is it embedded? What counts as (mis)use?

  • The “triangle model theory” of reading is presented in a series of theoretical papers (Harm & Seidenberg, 1999; Harm & Seidenberg, 2004; Plaut et al., 1996; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) reported in cognitive psychology journals like Psychology Review

  • The “triangle model theory” commits to principles (Seidenberg & Plaut, 2006):

    • cooperative and competitive interactions among simple neuron-­like processing units
    • different types of information represented by distributed pattens of activity over different groups of units
    • knowledge encoded as weights on connections between units
    • learning as gradual adjustment of connection weights based on the statistical structure among inputs and outputs

Discursive survival

Guest (2024):

  • The ability to be understood by interested non-bad actors
  • To withstand scrutiny within the intended (sub)field(s)
  • To negotiate the dialectical landscape (discussion to unearth, resolve, contradictions)

  • The “triangle model theory” of reading has frequently been contrasted with alternate or competing theories: compare the Dual Route theory (Coltheart et al., 2001; Pritchard et al., 2018) or CDP++ (Perry et al., 2007; Ziegler et al., 2014)

  • Discourse around the rival theories has sometimes been hot tempered but is often productive:

    • In-depth comparisons of theory principles
    • Progressive development of model specification or implementation information
    • Analyses of what phenomena the theories (implemented as models) can account for (simulate)
    • Refinement of assumptions about the causal psychological mechanisms invoked to do the explanatory work of the theories

Empirical interface

Guest (2024):

  • The potential to explicate the relationship between theory and observation

    • What formalisations are appropriate or necessary for the theory?
    • Which methodologies does the theory use to support or instantiate itself?
    • What evidence does the theory require?

  • The various presentations of the different theories have involved:

    • Cognitive process diagrams (box-and-arrow figures) and formal statements (math equations) on how network unit activation or learning works

    • Executable code (if shared) in languages like C for running simulations of reading behaviour using model instantiations of theories

    • Analyses of how model-based simulations do or do not capture reading phenomena:

      • observations of effects of different kinds of reading stimuli (e.g. words varying in spelling-sound regularity or consistency) on reading behaviours in children or adults

Minimising harm

Guest (2024):

  • Reckoning with the history of the theory and the potential for future harms

    • Does the theory contain great man theorising?
    • Is the theory exclusionary to certain people or ideas?
    • What is its relationship to previous theories?
    • Does the genealogy of the theory contain harmful ideas?
    • Do ancestral theories remain relevant to the present?
    • What harms have resulted or could result from the use of the theory?

Minimising harm

Scientists sometimes have a hard time recognizing or acknowledging problematic contexts or histories for our theories, or the potential for harms, but it is productive to reflect on these questions

Reading

Castles et al. (2018) discuss the long history of the often heated and obviously consequential argument between advocates of phonics and whole language approaches to how we teach children to read (see also Rayner et al., 2001)

strong scientific consensus around the importance of phonics instruction in the initial stages of learning to read

Minimising harm

It is productive to reflect on these questions

Reading

The history of reading research has mostly involved work in English in the UK and USA

  • Researchers interested in other languages have hard a hard time publishing observations even on major European languages like Spanish, let alone global majority languages like Mandarin Chinese (e.g., Tse et al., 2017)
  • We can see extensions of dual route or connectionist accounts to reading in other languages in the literature (Davies et al., 2013)
  • But researchers interested in non-English languages have to speak to theories about reading rooted in ideas about English and observations about English reading phenomena

Minimising harm

It is productive to reflect on these questions

Kalluri et al. (2025): research on computer vision increasingly involve extraction of human body and other socially salient data, enabling surveillance, though the language of research output obscures these applications

Minimising harm

It is productive to reflect on these questions

Reading

We can track the genealogy (family history) of contemporary theories about reading back to work like Rumelhart et al. (1986)

  • We must resist the temptation to adopt the perspectives or assumptions or language of Great Men

    • Geoff Hinton was one of the authors of the Rumelhart et al. (1986) paper and is now “the godfather of AI”

  • Reading research might seem a long way from potential harms but maybe this work and harmful AI work are at least cousins

What Makes a Good Theory, and How Do We Make a Theory Good?

Activate

Think about the psychological science you are interested in:

  • What do people talk about when they talk about (good or bad) theories in the area?
  • What in your view make theories good or bad?

End notes

  1. What theories are and do
  2. Why talking about this stuff is useful
  3. How we can build or develop theories
  4. What Makes a Good Theory, and How Do We Make a Theory Good?

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