From the role of context to the measurement problem: The Dutch connection pays tribute to Guy Van Orden

Abstract

The call for a daisy chain of replications by Daniel Kahneman (as cited in Yong, 2012) to combat the recent credibility problems of psychological science touches upon the issue that Guy dealt with ever since he started his academic career and that we acknowledge as one of his major contributions. After coming to terms with the fact that psycholinguistics (with strong roots in information-processing theory) never accepted the dogma of falsification, Guy advanced a different approach. Applying the so-called ideal strategy manipulation in his experiments, he showed that psycholinguistic effects are fundamentally context sensitive. Any subtle change in an experiment may cause the effect to appear, diminish, or to even disappear. This analysis of psycholinguistics in particular and psychological science in general leads us to believe that just replicating experiments will not easily solve the current crisis in psychology. We believe this crisis to be one of theory evaluation, allowing the scientific description of cognitive behavior as a linearly decomposable system to prevail in the face of anomalies and empirical falsification.