MORE ABOUT EMPIRICAL EVALUATION OF FORMAL THEORY.

The article focuses on empirical evaluation of formal theory. In the paper by researchers D.K. Hildebrand, J.D. Laing and H.L. Rosenthal, henceforth HLR, proposed an index to measure the adequacy of a particular kind of theory when confronted with harsh facts. The authors L.A. Goodman and W.H. Kruskal, henceforth GK, presented a critical analysis, together with constructive proposals towards partial mitigation of the flaws and gaps they found in HLR. The authors do not agree with the rationales given in HLR for the independence like denominator of the proposed index. One can, however, take the index as given and ask how it performs. It was noted in GK that the HLR index compares the theoretically empty cells with the multiplicative yardstick probabilities for those cells, and no adequate justification for this comparison was found. This is so for both the unweighted and weighted forms of the index. In GK, some modest ways around this problem was suggested without claiming necessarily wide applicability for the suggestions.