Theory

A theory is a unified, or coherent, body of propositions that provide a philosophically consistent picture of a subject. Indeed, our knowledge of communication is largely packaged into theories of various types. This entry explores the nature of theory and its key components—concepts and explanations. Variations on theory in the social sciences are also addressed.

Theories are human constructions designed to capture what theorists believe the order of the subject matter to be. Although natural scientists are clear about their quest for theories that reflect underlying structure, social scientists are divided on whether theories can reflect reality or whether theories actually constitute it. Although theory is sometimes contrasted with fact, a theory is more commonly understood as a way of packaging facts or experience. In physics, the parent of all natural sciences, any codified explanation of physical phenomena is considered a theory, even when its truth seems beyond doubt.

At a given time in certain fields, a prevailing theory is taken as true. Examples are relativity theory in physics and evolutionary theory in biology. The predominant theory changes incrementally as corrections are made and more detail added. From time to time in such fields, the normal view is overturned by a scientific revolution that transforms what is believed to be true. In the social sciences, many schools of thought make this ideal of a single normal theory unlikely, as different scholarly communities adopt different visions of what is normal or what constitutes a revolution in theory.

Theories should be generalizable in some way. They must reduce complex experience into a manageable set of concepts and propositions. Parsimony—the use of the simplest explanatory logic—is widely accepted as a hallmark of good theory. Thus a theory is never intended to reflect the complexity of all experience, but to distill this into a system of knowledge claims explained by a small number of properties. Investigators frequently search for a unifying concept that connects things that appear quite different on the surface. In physics, this is called the search for the theory of everything, the ultimate underlying explanation. This is a quest that many believe to be futile in human social life. However, as a social theory begins to resemble natural science—as is the case in genetic, neurological, and chemical approaches—universal explanations become less elusive.

The most basic component of a theory is its concepts. A concept is a category or class of objects, events, situations, or processes designated by a term. A concept encompasses a group of things that share one or more attributes. Concepts are frequently organized into a taxonomy of types. Although a simple taxonomy, or organized list of concepts, may be considered a theory, most scholars would say that this is only a step toward a true theory, which must include some explanatory mechanism or set of propositions that explain how concepts are related to one another.

The second component, then, is explanations that tie observed phenomena together in some kind of system beyond mere description. In biology, for [Page 958]example, living things are organized into a giant taxonomy of types, including many levels of subtypes (phylum, genus, species, etc.). Underlying this elaborate taxonomy, however, is a set of ideas that explains how species evolve and relate to one another genetically, and this forms the basis of similarities and differences in the living world. As another example, personality theories often identify types or traits, but should not stop at this point. They should instead provide some kind of explanatory connection between types and outcomes such as behavior or input variables such as heredity or learning.

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