Classifying Theories

It is first necessary to develop a typology of theory types. The approach used here involves the application of the 5W questions: who, what, why, when, and where. These prove very useful in distinguishing theories in human science. It may be useful to develop further distinctions, especially in natural science.

1. Who is the agent? There are two important distinctions here: non-intentional (including volcanoes or institutions) versus intentional agency (of beings that can act on purpose), each of which can take the form of individual, group, or relationship agency.

2. What does the agent do? There are three broad answers, which map imperfectly onto the six types of agency: passive (re-)action, active action, changes in attitude.

3. Why does the agent do this? With non-intentional agents, action can only be understood in terms of their inherent nature. With intentional agents, scholars can explore five distinct types of decision-making: rational, intuitive, process (virtue) oriented, rule-based, and tradition-based. For groups and relationships, scholars can also ask how individual preferences are aggregated.

4. Where does the causal process occur? The concern here is with the generalizability of the theory: there is a continuum between nomothetic (generalizable) and idiographic (situation- or causal-link-specific) theory.

5. When does the causal process occur? There are four broad time-paths that a causal process might follow: return to the original equilibrium, movement to a new equilibrium, change in a particular direction, or stochastic/uncertain.

The following table classifies some important theories in terms of these five dimensions. The point to emphasize is that different theories have different -- compensating -- strengths and weaknesses.

Typology of Selected Theories

Source: Rick Szostak, Classifying Science, 2004, 94. The table is developed and explained in ch. 4. This table is reprised and applied in Allen Repko,

Interdisciplinary Research (2nd ed., 2011) and Rick Szostak, Restoring Human Progress (2012).