To work on refining and verifying a theory, one first has to understand it, to be able to formulate theoretical conclusions given possible future data or arguments. While the validity of a theory in the current form isn’t certain, moving towards resolution of this uncertainty requires mastery of the theory, and it’s where the communication of experience comes in.
The direct analogy is with categorization: to measure the precision of a categorization technique, one first may need to implement the categorization algorithm. Resulting categories computed by the algorithm don’t claim to be the truth, they are merely labels with aspirations for predictive power.
To work on refining and verifying a theory, one first has to understand it, to be able to formulate theoretical conclusions given possible future data or arguments. While the validity of a theory in the current form isn’t certain, moving towards resolution of this uncertainty requires mastery of the theory, and it’s where the communication of experience comes in.
The direct analogy is with categorization: to measure the precision of a categorization technique, one first may need to implement the categorization algorithm. Resulting categories computed by the algorithm don’t claim to be the truth, they are merely labels with aspirations for predictive power.