{"id":178822,"date":"2026-03-30T07:25:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T15:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=178822"},"modified":"2026-03-30T07:41:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T15:41:09","slug":"the-good-bad-theory-case-in-emotion-analytics-ais-potential-and-limits-for-social-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=178822","title":{"rendered":"‘The \u201cGood bad theory\u201d case in emotion analytics: AI\u2019s potential and limits for social theory’"},"content":{"rendered":"

This 2026 paper by Andrey V. Rezaev and Natalia D. Tregubova says<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Stephen Turner presented, in a quite different sense, the term \u201cgood bad theory\u201d in his book Explaining the Normative<\/a> (2010). He uses the term to characterize common sense ideas for explaining human behavior in a particular culture: \u201cWhen we live in a society, we use a common set of ideas that enables coordination, assessing blame, and all sorts of other activities\u2026 Call these Good Bad Theories: they are good for the myriad purposes of coordination they serve, bad as science or explanation\u201d (Turner, 2013: 193).
\nOur characteristic of \u201cgood bad theory\u201d resembles Turner\u2019s in outlining a theory that is beneficial for practical purposes and application, but not theoretically sound.
\nHowever, there are two distinctions in our definition. First, we conceptualize \u2018theories\u2019 as scientific statements, but not general societal ideas and premises. Second, while for Turner theories are \u2018bad\u2019 because they are prescientific (in a sense), for us they are \u2018bad\u2019 because they are one-sidedly scientific or \u2018too scientific\u2019. In other words, they do best in formalization and calculability while ignoring the full picture of what is going on in societal practices.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This use of Turner’s “good bad theory” concept is both a tribute and a partial misreading. For Turner, good bad theories are pre-scientific common sense ideas that enable social coordination while being false as explanation. Think of folk notions of intention, blame, and shared norms: they hold societies together while failing as science. For Rezaev and Tregubova, the concept mutates into something almost opposite: theories that are too scientific, technically precise and computationally tractable but blind to phenomenological complexity. Their Collins and Russell cases are both guilty of this second kind of sin.
\nTurner’s own meaning is the more important one. The ideologically skewed social science Manzi documents<\/a> does not suffer from excess formalization. It suffers from theories that coordinate a professional coalition while remaining false as science. That is Turner’s original sense exactly. The left-coded frameworks Manzi measures are good bad theories in Turner’s sense: good for academic coalition maintenance, blame assignment, moral signaling, and grant acquisition; bad as causal accounts of social reality. The Rezaev-Tregubova version, by contrast, is a critique of positivism from the phenomenological left, a concern about quantification stripping meaning from emotion research.
\nThe two papers sitting in the same issue of Theory and Society thus illustrate Turner’s point. Manzi shows the coalition defending its territory across six decades of output. Rezaev and Tregubova show that coalition producing a phenomenological critique of formalization, which is precisely the kind of discourse that scores 7 or 8 on Manzi’s scale. The discipline protects itself from hard science incursions by insisting that formalization is epistemically violent, and it does so in the pages of the same journal that just published evidence of its own systematic ideological skew. The wars are real because, as Turner notes, many bad theories are \u201cgood\u201d for social coordination but bad for truth. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This 2026 paper by Andrey V. Rezaev and Natalia D. Tregubova says: Stephen Turner presented, in a quite different sense, the term \u201cgood bad theory\u201d in his book Explaining the Normative (2010). He uses the term to characterize common sense … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42986],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=178822"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178833,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178822\/revisions\/178833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=178822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=178822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=178822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}