More than 40 years ago, Paul Meehl (1978) published a seminal critique of the state of theorizing in psychological science. According to Meehl, the quality of theories had diminished in the preceding decades, resulting in statistical methods standing in for theoretical rigor. In this introduction to the special issue Theory in Psychological Science, we apply Meehl’s account to contemporary psychological science. We suggest that by the time of Meehl’s writing, psychology found itself in the midst of a crisis that is typical of maturing sciences, in which the theories that had been guiding research were gradually cast into doubt. Psychologists were faced with the same general choice when worldviews fail: Face reality and pursue knowledge in the absence of certainty, or shift emphasis toward sources of synthetic certainty. We suggest that psychologists have too often chosen the latter option, substituting synthetic certainties for theory-guided research, in much the same manner as Scholastic scholars did centuries ago. Drawing from our contributors, we go on to make recommendations for how psychological science may fully reengage with theory-based science.

40 多年前，Paul Meehl (1978) 发表了一篇对心理科学理论化状态的开创性批判。根据 Meehl 的说法，在过去的几十年中，理论的质量有所下降，导致统计方法代替了理论的严谨性。在这篇心理科学特刊理论介绍中，我们将 Meehl 的解释应用于当代心理科学。我们认为，到 Meehl 写作时，心理学发现自己处于成熟科学的典型危机之中，在这种危机中，一直在指导研究的理论逐渐受到质疑。当世界观失败时，心理学家面临着同样的普遍选择：在缺乏确定性的情况下面对现实并追求知识，或者将重点转向综合确定性的来源。我们建议心理学家过于频繁地选择后一种选择，用综合确定性代替理论指导的研究，与几个世纪前经院学者所做的方式大致相同。从我们的贡献者那里，我们继续就心理科学如何完全重新融入基于理论的科学提出建议。