Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Theories are one of the most important tools of science. Already Lewin (1943) noted “there is nothing as practical as a good theory”. Although psychologists discussed problems of theory in their discipline for a long time, weak theories are still widespread in most subfields. One possible reason for this is that psychologists lack the tools to systematically assesss the quality of their theories (Borsboom et al., 2020). Thagard (1989) developed a computational model for formal theory evaluation based on the concept of explanatory coherence. However, there are possible improvements to Thagard’s (1989) model and it is not available in software that psychologists typically use. Therefore, we developed an Ising model of Explanatory Coherence (IMEC) based on the ideas in Thagard (1989). IMEC evaluates theories in line with relevant criteria for good theories and is capable of comparing complex scientific theories. It is also available in the R-package IMEC so that it can help applied scientists to evaluate the quality of their theories in practice. This OSF repository contains code to reproduce our analyses and a short tutorial for fitting IMEC in R.