The other day I stood in front my bookshelf looking for a book I had purchased. I knew it was there. I put it there. In fact, my eyes kept returning to a specific location in the bookshelf, for I just knew it had to be there. It was not. After some growing frustration, I concluded that I must have brought it to work and absentmindedly left it behind. So, when I got to the office, I checked that bookshelf, but still no book. It was only a day or two later that I noticed my wife with it. Singing the praises of the lovely woman God gave me, who brings fresh creativity and beauty to our home on a regular basis, whose outgoing and caring personality results in people being in our home in ways I could never have imagined before meeting her, who also shares my deep love of God and sense of life as all-inclusive, missional adventure, and who is so earthy and grounded in being a full human being that she reminded me recently of just how important physical touch is to her — I now share with you a few things from that book.

John Stuart Mill, Thomas Kuhn, and Karl Popper are big names with regard to the way people think about science. They can be associated with various movements or schools of thought. According to Robert Proctor and E.J. Capaldi (Why Science Matters, Understanding the Methods of Psychological Research<$>, 2006, Blackwell Publishing), Mill argued that theories explaining already existing phenomena are on a par with theories produced through hypothesis testing that seeks to create predictions about future phenomena. Popper is associated with one of the two major foundationist approaches to science in the 20th century: falsificationism (scientists should seek to falsify their theories, and if they can, to discard them and any theories variously associated with them). Kuhn is probably best known for his thinking about paradigms and how they influence specific scientific work; he recommended an empirical approach in which, instead of focusing on how science ought to be practised, people investigate how science has actually been practised throughout history, leading up to and including how it is currently being practised among scientists today.

Groups of commitments to the way people think about science have followed such that one group is descriptive, another is explanatory, and a third is predictive. When I take these three approaches back into ordinary life, they bring about some interesting results. I put the book in a particular place predicting that I would be able to find it there when next I wanted it. However, I stood in front of the bookshelf describing to myself my sense of puzzlement and frustration when I kept going back to the place where I predicted I would find it, only to discover that it was not there. The explanation was that my wife had also found the book interesting, and she had removed it from that spot so she could read it herself.

One observation about all this is that I think people often run into trouble when they attempt to operate on the basis of just one of these approaches.

Along with the desire to predict, I have found that people usually also cluster the need to control and the assumption that they understand the truth of the matter. That is, the way they are seeing things is an accurate picture. They know the causative factors that lead someone to do what they do; consequently, they can predict what that person will do “next time.” Because they think they know what’s coming next, they then proceed to various action steps designed to control the situation and make it turn out the way they want. The whole enterprise is often a disaster. People rarely have all the facts or see them accurately, and people have very little actual control over others. So, it results in a fantasy, and people end up fooling themselves all the way into misery.

When people describe, it seems they leave out any description of themselves. The way this works is that someone will say to the other, “You’re being mean to me.” “You forgot my birthday.” “This day sucks.” What they don’t include is, “I wanted you to love me.” “I’m feeling sad and disappointed.” “I was looking forward to a nice time.” These kinds of self-disclosures are risky, but they often reveal someone to another in a way that can remove an accusation.

When people explain, they make a meaning out of what they are experiencing. This is not simply thinking one has the facts in a situation; this is taking what one believes are the facts and making up a story to explain them. Everyone does this; however, when these stories take on the power of historical fact, then one is seldom open to hearing another version of history. That can become limiting and destructive in relationships.

What works well is to keep a balance among the three approaches: describe one’s inner as well as outer world and hold loosely to one’s explanatory theories, reserving prediction for only those things that have been proven over time and with testing.