IMEC

Theories are one of the most important tools of science. 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 assess the quality of their theories. Previously a computational model for formal theory evaluation based on the concept of explanatory coherence was developed (Thagard, 1989, doi:10.1017/S0140525X00057046). However, there are possible improvements to this model and it is not available in software that psychologists typically use. Therefore, a new implementation of explanatory coherence based on the Ising model is available in this R-package.