ABSTRACT
How the stories of the genesis and maturation of theoretical ideas resemble each other. When we consider the course of theory development from a metatheoretical perspective, we soon encounter a persistent bias in theoretical thinking that has intrigued Karl Popper (1935) and that was neatly illustrated by Paul Wason (1960) many decades ago. When asked to find out the rule underlying a series of numbers such as the series 2, 4, 8, ?, people would typically engage in positive tests of sensible but too restrictive “theories”. For instance, they might assume the rule is 2N (with N denoting increasing natural numbers) and test whether choosing 16 for the next number fulfills the rule. The feedback would be positive and so they are already quite confident that the theory is correct. Another positive test, 32, would also be met with a positive feedback, and confidence would rise close to certainty. In this positively reinforcing research process, hardly anybody finds out that the underlying generic rule is much less restricted and leaves room for a much broader variety of numerals. Thus, the “true theory” may be any positive accelerated function of N, or any series that increases monotonically, or even any series of numbers, or any alphanumeric symbols.
