Theory in any field reflects our abilities and intentions to extract specific meanings from any phenomenon in the quest to reduce our explanations to their bare essence. In this sense, theories abstract from an agreed reality throwing away that which appears irrelevant to the purpose in hand and only keeping what appears to be essential to good explanation. Developing, testing and then ultimately using good theory in any context thus depends on working with ideas that are not obstructed by anything that is not central to the purpose in hand. This may mean that much of what would appear to be relevant in other contexts for other purposes is abandoned, simply put on one side, as being unimportant to the particular abstraction of concern. This does not mean that theories always meet the criterion of parsimony for there may well be situations when the abstractions in question are extremely rich, containing many features and concepts that cannot be tested or are based entirely on assumptions that cannot be validated but nevertheless appear plausible. But in developing good theory, much of the reality we perceive must always be neglected in our search for the essential logic for which theory is being developed.
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