ABSTRACT
Psychology is a subject in which the audience should have knowledge of the experimenter’s presuppositions before interpreting his results. This chapter discusses the conviction that much of educational psychology is trivial; involves a distrust of complex statistics; and a rejection of psychological theorizing which is unduly rigorous or precise. In psychology, theories come in a bewildering variety of forms. Some are qualitative hunches, others use painstaking statistical analysis. Some concern causes; others merely seek to summarize and describe. The ‘blindness’ of a theory will depend to a considerable extent, of course, on the detachment of the theorizer. However, there are theories which one suspects are inherently blind, or at least ‘myopic’. Factor analytic theories about the structure of the intellect are a case in point. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
