ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF A PSYCHOLOGICAL <i>FACT</i>
The article is devoted to a methodologically important issue. A special relevance of this work is that many authors do not recognize the problem of a fact as a methodological problem. In the popular psychological dictionary the word fact is generally defined as the result of observation or experiment that does not allow equivocation. This contradicts widely known situations where the fact is evaluated and interpreted in different ways. This approach does not allow to solve the problem. The article examines the approach to the problem of a fact that has developed in the philosophy of science. There is a detailed discussion of A.L. Nikiforov’s research, who offered to consider a fact as having a structure. This is a promising approach, but it is insufficient for psychology. The article states that for psychology one should use a tiered approach to interpret a fact. A tiered approach can be implemented, if we address the problem in the context of the methodological theory of scientific research. The author of the article talks about the perspectives of further investigation aimed at searching for the synthesis of tiered nature and structural analysis of a fact.