Brain Haig’s brilliant book fills the important gap in contemporary psychological research practices and methodological literature in psychology. In the preface of his book, he underlines the fact that contemporary psychological scientists and psychology students tend to have a limited understanding of scientific method, which consequently results in misuse of research methods and their low level of scientific literacy. However, his book – apart from being an interesting read for those who are interested in the nature of psychological explanations – is a lot more than just a witty overview of what is lacked in contemporary psychological theories and how they can benefit from deeper understanding of philosophy of science. In his book, Haig takes very seriously psychology’s commitment to scientific method, and does so by constructing a broad theory of this method, which is informed by insights in contemporary scientific methodology and is approachable to those who conduct psychological research. The author introduces what he dubs the “abductive theory of method” (ATOM). This method essentially consists of two phrases: the first one involves the detection of phenomena in question; the latter involves the construction of explanatory theories aiming to explain psychological claims about the identified phenomena. Essentially, his theory draws upon the “new experimentalism” in philosophy of science, and aims to illuminate the process of phenomena detection. It also drives upon the large body of literature concerning theory construction.

The book consists of five well-crafted main chapters. Chapter 1 introduces and discusses the topic of scientific method, by providing some background material. In Chapter 2, Haig turns to discussion of new experimentalism in the philosophy of science, in order to reconstruct the process of phenomena detection as applied to psychological research. Chapter 3 explores the abductive nature of theory generation, and does so by examining the logic and purpose of the method of exploratory factor analysis. In Chapter 4, the Author examines analogical modeling – one of the most important approaches to scientific modeling. In Chapter 5, Haig discusses and recommends the use of “inference to the best explanation” as a tool for evaluating the worth of theories in psychology.

B. Haig’s Investigating the Psychological World is a great and dense book, recommended for both psychology students and professionals, that want to become more conscious of the importance of philosophy of science and works on scientific methodology to psychological investigations and, by extension, to behavioral sciences in general.

© 2013 Jakub Matyja

Jakub Matyja, currently a PhD student in Philosophy at Polish Academy of Sciences, works in embodied, enactive and extended music cognition