The No-Theories Theory

Posted by admin on November 27, 2007

== While I take a break for the holidays, enjoy “The Best of Bigfoot Quest.” ==

Pick up a book about Bigfoot and you’ll find lots of sightings, lots of photos of Bigfoot researchers, but very little of one ingredient: theories. An awful lot of Bigfoot researchers pride themselves on their lack of theorizing, on their dogmatic refusal to consider any theory about the nature of Bigfoot. “I don’t have a theory,” they might say, “I just investigate the sightings.” About 30 seconds ago, I named this attitude the No-Theories Theory. On the surface, the statement sounds reasonable, and even noble. You don’t formulate theories, you just gather sightings.

Why?

Why talk to witnesses if you have no interest in examining the data, forming hypotheses, and debating the merits of those hypotheses? Proponents of the No-Theories Theory collect sightings, toss them in a database, and forget about them. Maybe they run some software that spits out a few statistics about the average height or weight of Bigfoot. Maybe the statistics show Bigfoot mainly eat meat on Tuesdays.

As I discussed in my Semantics Series posts, Bigfooters don’t like to admit they believe in Bigfoot. If you can’t admit to believing these creatures exist, then it makes sense that you avoid developing ideas about what they are and how they fit into the grand scheme of life. If you subscribe to the No-Theories Theory, stop and ask yourself one question: What is the point of your research?

Source: The No-Theories Theory