Applied & Preventive Psychology 11 (2004) 3537

Commentary

Falsification and the protective belt surrounding

entity-postulating theories
Steven C. Hayes
Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557-0062, USA

Abstract
Meehls article is a contradiction. In every area, he recognizes some of what is wrong and then advocates a course that will produce more of
the same. He sees the problem with falsification and in essence advocates for its alternative, verification, but falsely claims this strategy is
still falsification and is useful when there is a loose link between theories and their auxiliaries and conditions. He acknowledges the proven
value of tightening the link between theories and their auxiliaries and conditions, but rejects that course because it does not apply to his
preferred theories. Twenty-five years later there is even more slow progress to ponder. It is time to dismantle the protective belt surrounding
entity-postulating theories that Meehls reasoning has helped to create.
2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Falsification; Verification; Entity-postulating theories

Meehls classic article is both brilliant and frustrating. On

the one hand, he detects and illuminates the problems of soft
psychology with incisiveness and a level of honesty that can
only be described as brutal. On the other hand, he fails to appreciate his own role, in this article and others, in protecting
failed theoretical approaches. From the vantage point provided by 25 years of distance, after the sense of intellectual
awe wears off it is the contradictions that are most striking.
Meehl has always preferred entity-postulating theories
as he says in several different ways in this article. He
is a trained psychoanalyst. He has been through analysis
himself. Although his best known work to a general psychological audience is methodological and conceptual, his
substantive theoretical and empirical work has emphasized
one hypothesized entity after another.
The slow progress he is speaking of could hardly
be more evident than in some of the research areas he
prefers (e.g., psychoanalytic theories; personality theory).
The methodological arguments he has made (such as the
distinction between hypothetical constructs and intervening variables; the concept of nomological networks; the
importance of falsification) need to be seen in that light.
The paradox of this article and of Meehls thinking more
generally, is that he has always been too intelligent to

E-mail address: hayes@unr.edu (S.C. Hayes).

0962-1849/$ see front matter 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.appsy.2004.02.004

deny the problems presented by the kinds of theories he

prefers, but has also been too stubborn to view his theoretical preferences as a foundational problem. Rather, over the
last 50 years his arguments and criticisms have paradoxically helped build the case for the kind of theoretical work
that has produced the problems he laments. With his help
psychology has constructed an intellectual protective belt
around entity-postulating theories, and with the collapse of
classic behaviorism, hardly anyone seems to have noticed.
In this article, Meehl carefully lays out some of the key
conceptual and measurement difficulties that must be faced
by soft psychology, and rightly condemns the dominance
of statistical inferential tests in our field, but then he suddenly
(and without any real defense) lurches toward an embrace of
falsificationism (p. 817). The present article is often cited as
if it supports falsifiability, and Meehl himself seems to speak
of it that way, but it emphatically does not. Indeed, a defense of Poppers modus tollens is barely mounted (p. 317)
before Meehl appreciates its key logical flaw: tests of theories require auxiliaries and conditions that are themselves
not tested (p. 818). Meehl notes that in the hard sciences this
is not so much of a problem, because there is not a large gap
between tested theories and the auxiliaries and conditions
that go into the test. Meehl notes such is hardly the case in
the soft sciences which makes it hard for us social scientists
to fulfill a Popperian falsifiability requirement (p. 819). The
only solution Meehl is able to come up with in defense

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S.C. Hayes / Applied & Preventive Psychology 11 (2004) 3537

of falsifiability under these conditions is the empirical (not

logical) principle of the very strange coincidence (p. 821)
between empirical observations and the antecedently improbable observational patterns (p. 821) suggested by a theory and loosely linked auxiliaries and conditions precisely
because they are loosely linked.
There are two important things worth mentioning about
this idea. First, this is not falsification: it is verification. Indeed, in case anyone doubts it, note that Meehl later comes
to the same verification-based conclusion in the section on
statistical inference, emphasizing that it is valuable to show
approximate agreement of observations with a theoretically
predicted numerical point value, rank order, or function
form (p. 825; italics in the original). Second, once this argument is seen as a form of verification, it should also be
noted that the loose link between theory and linked auxiliaries and conditions becomes a curse to the larger research
program, not a secret source of logical strength as it might
be in a specific study as Meehl argues. The reason is this:
poorly understood variability in auxiliaries and conditions
can (and probably will) lead useful theories to fail to correspond to the data for reasons that have nothing to do with
the theory. Stated another way, while Meehl is correct that
verification can still work in the soft sciences based on the
principle of a very strange coincidence if an analysis is
specific and non-obvious, a lack of correspondence provides
a weak guide in these circumstances because it may not be
very strange or unexpected, even if the theory is in principle
useful, if auxiliaries and conditions are poorly linked to the
theory.
As a behavioral psychologist I do not find the collapse of
falsification disturbing. Falsification is logically true only in
an abstract and limited universe. In the real world it is both
logically and psychologically false. The former is shown by
Meehl, Lakatos, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and others. The latter is
shown by behavioral psychology itself. Organisms, scientists
included, work on the basis of consequences and thus it
will always be the achievement of consequences that drives
science. I believe that the goal of science is the construction
of increasingly organized systems of verbal rules that allow
analytic goals to be accomplished with precision, scope, and
depth, and based on verifiable experience (Hayes, 1993).
Scientific analyses that are high in precision and scope allow
for the kind of broad and specific tests that lead to detection
of a poor fit with the data, but that is not falsification in
a technical sense: it is simply the condition under which
verification provides a particularly useful guide to a research
program. For scientific analyses to have high precision and
scope, however, there has to be a small gap between theory
and the auxiliaries and conditions. And that is where Meehls
analysis loses its nerve.
By their very nature, entity-postulating theories are
loosely fitted to their assumptions and conditions, as Meehl
himself argues. For example, Meehl notes that Skinners
more inductive approach does not usually present us with
the kind of evidentiary evaluation problems that we get

with entity-postulating theories (p. 824) and then goes on

to the solutions he proposes for those of us whose cognitive passions are incompletely satisfied by [such] theories
(p. 824). Why does not this very preference and sense of
incomplete satisfaction need to be defended intellectually?
Meehl does not say. Meehl notes that in the realm of replicable observations Skinner is in better shape than Freud
(p. 813) and later agrees that the reasons for this might
mean that we could most profitably confine ourselves to
low-order inductions, a (to me, depressing) conjecture that
is somewhat corroborated by the fact that the two most
powerful forms of clinical psychology are a theoretical
psychometrics of prediction on the one hand and behavior
modification on the other (p. 829). But instead of following
through with the implications of his own analysis, Meehl
rejects more inductive approaches on the grounds that they
do not have the kind of conceptual richness that attracts
the theory-oriented mind (p. 829). In the extended addendum Meehl goes one step farther, explaining I cheerfully
admit, in this matter, to the presence of a large distance between my subjective personalistic probability (based on my
experiences as analysand and practitioner of psychoanalytic
psychotherapy) and the present state of the intersubjective
public evidence. (p. 830).
As a human matter, it is hard to be cross with someone
who cheerfully points to what may be a terribly irrational
leap of faith (p. 831), but as a scientific matter, more is
involved and more should be expected. Every intellectual
criticism Meehl offers of soft psychology is made notably
worse in the context of entity-postulating theories, and yet
the only reasons Meehl offers for not abandoning them is
he is theoretically-minded, he has cognitive passions,
and he has had personal experiences in analysis that he finds
interesting. That is a defense that is as weak as his criticism
of soft psychology is strong.
In the 25 years since this article first appeared, approaches
to psychology that emphasize concepts that are tightly
linked to their observations have continued to progress,
slowly but surely. Many do not know this because these
areas have fallen so far out of fashion. Areas that emphasize entity-postulating theories have continued to excite and
then disappointa cycle that Meehl carefully documents.
Many do not know this, because they are blinded by the
excitement of the latest new thing. Unfortunately, this very
article and others in this related line of reasoning, have
protected these latter approaches. Somehow the message
that has come through is that with sufficient tough mindedness, entity-postulating theories can be constructed that will
finally work. It is a perverse combination: the appearance
of scientific rigor, vigorous criticism of the sad state of our
field, and unexamined embrace of a form of theorizing that
has never succeeded against either of these criteria.
Meehls article still casts a challenging and harsh light
on psychology but in the context of the 20 difficulties
listed we now have 25 more years of experience leading
to the conclusion Meehl refused to state in simple form:

S.C. Hayes / Applied & Preventive Psychology 11 (2004) 3537

there are no scientific methods that can reliably provide

entity-postulating theories with a route toward scientific
success. Psychology should take a cleaner and more radical step than the one Meehl proposes: entity-postulating
theories must themselves be questioned or even abandoned.

37

Reference
Hayes, S. C. (1993). Analytic goals and the varieties of scientific contextualism. In S. C. Hayes, L. J. Hayes, H. W. Reese, & T. R. Sarbin
(Eds.), Varieties of scientific contextualism (pp. 1127). Reno, NV:
Context Press.