Excerpt: The topic of this paper arises in research into developmental psychology in the form of the problem of the relative importance of external conditions and the subjective orientation attainments of individuals. However, it also represents a general philosophical problem, transcending not only questions of the philosophy of science but even problems of epistemology. […] In the first part of this paper I shall describe and criticize various possibilities with respect to preliminary methodological decisions con-||cerning the collection of data in order, in the second part, to delineate an alternative which avoids the errors which have come to light, in the hope that my criticism in the first part is not understood as a general methodological condemnation of a sub-discipline of psychology.