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Discovery in Cognitive Psychology: New Tools Inspire New Theories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Gerd Gigerenzer
Gerd Gigerenzer
Affiliation:
Department of PsychologyUniversity of Chicago
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Abstract

Scientific tools—measurement and calculation instruments, techniques of inference—straddle the line between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In discovery, new scientific tools suggest new theoretical metaphors and concepts; and in justification, these tool-derived theoretical metaphors and concepts are morelikely to be accepted by the scientific community if the tools are already entrenched in scientific practice.

Techniques of statistical inference and hypothesis testing entered American psychology first as tools in the 1940s and 1950s and then as cognitive theories in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did psychologists resists statistical metaphors of mind prior to the institutionalization of inference techniques in their own practice; the cognitive theories they ultimately developed about “the mind as intuitive statistician” still bear the telltale marks of the practical laboratory context in which the tool was used.

Type
Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Autumn 1992 , pp. 329 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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