Constructing a theory

This is a working paper which will probably be rewritten several times in the next months
AUTHOR: Dr. Gerd Döben-Henisch
FIRST DATE: February 19, 1996
DATE of LAST CHANGE: February 28, 1996
If one wants to 'explain' the 'phenomenological experience' one has to construct a systematic description of the phenomena in question. Such a description implies the usage of some presupposed language L. As a result one will get some text T written in the language L whose syntactical structures can 'meaningfully' be related to the set of phenomena which have to be explained.

Any such text T who has been produced with the intention to 'explain' some sets of phenomena and which seems to be 'meaningful' to the readers of the text can -in a very broad sense of the term- be called a theory.

One can try to 'improve' the quality of theories by the usage of specialized formal languages and formal theory concepts (see: Formal Theory). But the main problem resides in the relationship between the explaining text and the kind of phenomena one wants to describe with the text.

Until today have those theories been most succesful which have restricted the domain of allowed phenomena to the the subclass of socalled empirical phenomena, here called D-OBJ (see below); SUBSET(D-OBJ, D-PHEN).

But because D-OBJ is a real subset of D-PHEN, science has also to cope with those phenomena which are not in D-OBJ. We will therefor call any theory which tries to explain phenomena, an explaining theory. Empirical theories are then only special kinds of explaining theories.

Continue with: Psychology enhanced by introspection

Comments are welcomed to kip-ml@inm.de
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