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Elucidation vs Pseudo-Explanation in Psychology: A Response to Professor Wetherick

University of Manchester, wes.sharrock{at}man.ac.uk

Jeff Coulter

Boston University, jeffcoul{at}acs.bu.edu

Our response to Professor Wetherick (1999) encompasses some issues beyond the purview of his contribution, but which we believe are relevant to a serious appraisal of his comments on our original paper on J.J. Gibson (Sharrock & Coulter, 1998). In our view, Wetherick perists in the conflation of conceptual and empirical questions, presenting a more complex `solution' to the Gibsonian problem which we had attempted not to solve but to dissolve. Therefore, we are led to treat his constructive proposals in the same way as we did those of Gibson, namely as misplaced attempts to theorize about the nature of human visual capacities. We contest his appeal to the concept of an `object' in his theorizing about vision. Moreover, we note that Wetherick assumes as fact a point which we seriously contested in our original paper: the causal role of the retinal image in human vision.

Key Words: ordinary language • perception • retinal image • scientism

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 9, No. 4, 557-563 (1999)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354399094008


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