Abstract

Comparative psychology is a strongly interdisciplinary field that shares many of its experimental methods and observational techniques with ethology and developmental psychology. The great variety of theories that comparative psychology evokes to explain behavior generates a wide array of exciting and potentially fruitful accounts, but is also problematic. It increases the risk of error in the forms of inconsistent background assumptions, conceptual misunderstandings, unfalsifiable hypotheses and incoherent explanations, which in spite of perhaps being minor by themselves will impede scientific progress in the long run. Moreover, similarly to psychology at large, comparative psychology tends to emphasize empirical investigations to the disadvantage of the analysis and development of theories and concepts. Consequently, disagreements that have their roots elsewhere than in methodology and experimental design do not receive sufficient attention. Furthermore, while evidence about biological evolution is notoriously hard to find, the methodology for comparing the capacities of different species is under continuous development. This forces comparative psychology to rely on the adequacy of the theoretical and conceptual framework to a greater extent than normally in the empirical sciences. In view of investigating the background of the problems that contemporary comparative psychology is facing, the present chapter examines central parts of the methodology and explanatory framework of comparative psychology as well as its global objective.