Psychologists are rightly concerned with validity of their manipulations and measures but it is far from clear what it means for these to be valid. Psychologists and philosophers who are interested in the issue have proposed several competing definitions. My goal is not to evaluate these definitions or even to review them. Rather, I start from the literature on the falsification of theories and use that literature to illustrate the importance of auxiliary assumptions in theory testing. Subsequent to this illustration, I argue that auxiliary assumptions should play a more central role in how psychologists and philosophers think about validity.
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