Conceptual correlation: An example of two social psychological theories

In the present paper Cohen's and Lee's theory of social conformity and Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance are first reconstructed according to a revised form of the so-called structuralist theory-conception developed by Sneed and Stegmüller with their collaborators. Then the two theories are conceptually correlated in the sense of a technical notion of conceptual correlation which can be shown to be an essential generalization of the theory-relations handled by the structuralists.It will turn out that there is no unique way to connect these theories with each other. However, it is shown that two ontologically and conceptually different theories can be correlated. This in turn gives in principle an opportunity to compare critically these two theories given that the constructed conceptual correlation is sufficiently sound and that the theories are empirically testable to a sufficient extent.