ON THE PURPOSES SERVED BY PSYCHOLOGICAL-RESEARCH AND ITS CRITICS

We concur with Wallach and Wallach's (1998) subjective assessment that much psychological research contributes little to our corpus of knowl edge, but we dispute their analysis of the causes of this problem. A c ritical assessment of their analysis reveals it to be (a) logically fl awed, (b) irrelevant to hypotheses concerning psychological processes, and (c) potentially injurious to the processes through which creative scientific hypotheses are developed. The Wallachs' article may serve a valuable purpose-but only if read very critically.