IMEC

This package computes the Ising Model of Explanatory Coherence for theory comparison and
theory appraisal.

Theories are one of the most important tools of science. Although psychologists discussed problems of theory in their discipline for a long time, weak theories are still widespread in most subfields.
One possible reason for this is that psychologists lack the tools to systematically assess the quality of their theories.
Previously a computational model for formal theory evaluation based on the concept of explanatory coherence was developed (Thagard, 1989, <doi:10.1017/S0140525X00057046>).
However, there are possible improvements to this model and it is not available in software that psychologists typically use.
Therefore, a new implementation of explanatory coherence based on the Ising model is available in this R-package.

Maximilian Maier

Ising Model of Explanatory Coherence

Noah van Dongen

Denny Borsboom

IMEC function

intializeNetwork constructs an initial empty explanatoy network
Explain and Contradict specify explanatory relations.

Construct Explanary Network

computeIMEC computes the Ising model of explanatory coherence and returns
an object of class IMEC. Use summary to summarize the result and plot to plot the
explanatory relations.

IMEC: IMEC

Description

Arguments

Construct Explanary Network

Calculate IMEC