Paul Everett Meehl

A brilliant thinker and a gifted teacher, Paul Meehl’s love for and dedication to the philosophy of science did not lead him, as it seems to have led others, to assume that all minds have the same structure and differ only parametrically. One of Meehl’s main interests in the latter part of his career was in taxometric methods for identifying psychological types or taxa. Another taxonomic method seeks traits that are very similar, for genetic reasons, in monozygotic twins, but not in other sib pairs. These emergenic traits may be more common than previously realized. Two examples are briefly discussed.     

Tabular asterisks, Paul Meehl, and looking at the data

Three of Meehl’s major concerns are examined in this summary. They are the problem of null-hypothesis testing as a strategy, the central significance of heterogeneity in human behavior, and the over-dependence on rating scales with their inherent lack of precision.     

Paul Meehl as methodologist-philosopher of science: the formulation of metascience

Paul Meehl's contributions to methodology and the philosophy of science extend well beyond his widely known writings in such areas as construct validity and statistical significance testing. I describe one of Meehl's less well-known, but potentially most important, methodological undertakings: his work on metascience, or the science of science. Metascience could ultimately revolutionize our conceptualizations and understanding of science and provide considerable help to practicing scientists and scientific endeavors, including efforts to advance the development and appraisal of theories in psychology.     

Variables in Psychology: A Critique of Quantitative Psychology

Mind is hidden from direct observation; it can be studied only by observing behavior. Variables encode information about behaviors. There is no one-to-one correspondence between behaviors and mental events underlying the behaviors, however. In order to understand mind it would be necessary to understand exactly what information is represented in variables. This aim cannot be reached after variables are already encoded. Therefore, statistical data analysis can be very misleading in studies aimed at understanding mind that underlies behavior. In this article different kinds of information that can be represented in variables are described. It is shown how informational ambiguity of variables leads to problems of theoretically meaningful interpretation of the results of statistical data analysis procedures in terms of hidden mental processes. Reasons are provided why presence of dependence between variables does not imply causal relationship between events represented by variables and absence of dependence between variables cannot rule out the causal dependence of events represented by variables. It is concluded that variable-psychology has a very limited range of application for the development of a theory of mind—psychology.

Encompassing experience: Meanings and methods in health psychology

Abstract

Health psychology is limited by its almost exclusive use of a positivist quantitative research paradigm, and the adoption and use of qualitative methods by health psychologists will provide increased understandings of health and illness. Qualitative methods provide a means to incorporate the social world into our research, and furnish ways to investigate the meanings of health and illness experience. We present a brief consideration of the qualitative paradigm and some important underlying issues related to its use. We describe three qualitative approaches - grounded theory, narrative analysis, and discourse analysis - chosen for their relevance and diversity. We provide illustrations of the use of each in health research, and suggest how these approaches could be utilised by health psychologists to enrich understanding in the health field. We conclude that health psychologists have a great deal to gain from joining other social science health researchers in adopting qualitative approaches in their research.     

Flashpoints in Interpreting Paul

In this article, Luther Seminary New Testament scholar Arland Hultgren outlines the unresolved issues of the “New Perspective on Paul”: (1) the question of legalism in pre‐Pauline Judaism; (2) justification by faith; and (3) the use of the objective or subjective genitive in the “pistis Christou Debate.” On the question as to whether Luther got Paul right, Hultgren points out a difficulty, namely, those addressing this question frequently fail to designate precisely what they mean by “Lutheran.”     

Visual statistical learning in the newborn infant

Statistical learning – implicit learning of statistical regularities within sensory input – is a way of acquiring structure within continuous sensory environments. Statistics computation, initially shown to be involved in word segmentation, has been demonstrated to be a general mechanism that operates across domains, across time and space, and across species. Recently, statistical leaning has been reported to be present even at birth when newborns were tested with a speech stream. The aim of the present study was to extend this finding, by investigating whether newborns’ ability to extract statistics operates in multiple modalities, as found for older infants and adults. Using the habituation procedure, two experiments were carried out in which visual sequences were presented. Results demonstrate that statistical learning is a general mechanism that extracts statistics across domain since the onset of sensory experience. Intriguingly, present data reveal that newborn learner’s limited cognitive resources constrain the functioning of statistical learning, narrowing the range of what can be learned.     

'Dancing cannot start too soon': Spiritual education in the thought of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter

Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825) adopted the pen-name 'Jean Paul' in honour of Jean Jaques Rousseau. His Levana or the doctrine of education (Levana oder Erziehlehre) was once a standard text and required reading in teacher education. Outside Germany the name of Jean Paul is now little known and the seminal educational text for which he was famous is rarely read. This neglect of Jean Paul is undeserved. What Jean Paul owed to Rousseau is apparent, but his work is rich in insight of his own. Three principles undergird Jean Paul's understanding of spiritual education (geistige Erziehung). Jean Paul insisted that spiritual education is essentially counter-cultural, that it is promoted by play and that it is grounded in love. Such education can never be at home in a curriculum which, however lofty are its stated objectives, is ultimately politically controlled. Jean Paul's insistence that play is constitutive of education needs to be heeded in an educational culture in which the playful is always at risk of displacement by what the government of the day deems to be of greater consequence. The heart of Jean Paul's understanding of education can be expressed succinctly, 'We love to teach and we teach to love'.     

Paul Hinlicky's Critical Dogmatics: Triune Redemption and Hope in the Beloved Community

In a host of recent publications, Paul Hinlicky has offered both methodological and substantive contributions to a constructive Lutheran theology that takes seriously the post‐Christendom context in which the church finds itself. By elaborating a vision of theology as “critical dogmatics,” Hinlicky adapts pragmatist and perspectivalist motifs to outline a trinitarian picture of the redemption of creation as well as the church's role in anticipating the coming of the Beloved Community. Grounded both in Romans 8 and the trinitarian implications of Luther's joyful exchange, Hinlicky's vision interweaves soteriological, eschatological, and ecclesiological themes to demonstrate how critical dogmatics can test the spirits of a given age in order to determine which features of contemporary existence align with God's ongoing redemptive work, and which must be opposed by the church.     

The Economy of the Gift: Paul Ricoeur's Significance for Theological Ethics

Paul Ricoeur's understanding of the relations of faith, love, and hope suggests a unique approach to theological ethics, one that holds fresh promise for bringing together considerations of the good (teleology) and the right (deontology) around the notion of an “economy of the gift.” The economy of the gift articulates Ricoeur's distinctively dialectical understanding of the relation of the human and the divine, and the resulting dialectical moral relation of the self and the other. Despite our fallen condition, Ricoeur suggests, we are called by the divine to embrace the radical possibility of the reconciliation of human goods under the requirement of accountability to human diversity and otherness.     

The Economy of the Gift: Paul Ricoeur's Significance for Theological Ethics

Paul Ricoeur's understanding of the relations of faith, love, and hope suggests a unique approach to theological ethics, one that holds fresh promise for bringing together considerations of the good (teleology) and the right (deontology) around the notion of an economy of the gift. The economy of the gift articulates Ricoeur's distinctively dialectical understanding of the relation of the human and the divine, and the resulting dialectical moral relation of the self and the other. Despite our fallen condition, Ricoeur suggests, we are called by the divine to embrace the radical possibility of the reconciliation of human goods under the requirement of accountability to human diversity and otherness.     

Paul,Luther, and the Cross: In Dialog with Karl Donfried

In response to the articles appearing in Dialog 46:1 (Spring 2007), David Brondos defends his position that in Paul's thought Christ's death did not “effect” human salvation, over against Karl Donfried's critique of that position. While Brondos and Donfried agree that Luther got the essence of Paul's gospel right and that Paul did not understand Jesus' death in terms of satisfaction or penal substitution, Brondos argues that the idea of “inclusive substitution” defended by Donfried and characteristic of the “new perspective on Paul” is foreign to the thought of both Paul and Luther.     

Ducking the collection of costly evidence: Motivated use of statistical heuristics

We examined whether motivation affects people's use of statistical heuristics. In two studies, subjects had to decide how many instances to observe before making predictions. Half the subjects were led to believe that the observation of each instance would be relatively high in cost, and half were led to believe that it would be relatively low in cost. In both studies, only subjects for whom evidence collection was relatively high in cost accessed the aggregation principle and came to believe that aggregates afforded greater predictability than did single instances. Their belief that predictability increases sharply with sample size may have allowed these subjects to conclude what they wanted to conclude, namely that smaller samples would suffice for their predictions.     

The psychology of life construction

The present article analyzes, from a historical perspective, the object of the study in the fields of vocational guidance and career management. It then considers the contemporary need to view workers as collaborators within organizations. Finally, in the third part, it presents tentative principles for the construction of a new paradigm called the psychology of life construction.     

Applying social cognitive career theory to predict interests and choice goals in statistics among Spanish psychology students

This study investigated the usefulness of social cognitive career theory—SCCT (Lent, Brown, and Hackett, 1994) in predicting interests and goals relating to statistics among psychology students. The participants were 1036 Spanish students who completed measurements of statistics-related mastery experiences, self-efficacy, outcome expectations, interests and goals/intentions. Structural equation modeling (including multi-group analysis) was used to test the fit of the hypothesized models to the data. Results indicated support for SCCT as a way to predict students' interests in statistics and their intentions of engaging in academic or professional activities where statistics is used. Collectively, the predictors accounted for 50% of the variance in interests and for 77% of the variance in goals. Implications both for future research on SCCT and for intervention in statistics education are discussed.     

The myth of open concepts: Meehl’s analysis of construct meaning versus black box essentialism

Two views of theoretical concepts in psychology are compared. Meehl’s “open concept” account holds that theoretical concepts are implicitly defined by theories but that empirical criteria can be changed over time (e.g., added or dropped, weightings changed, exchanged for theoretical reductions). This account confuses concepts and theories, does not reflect how diagnostic concepts actually work in medicine and psychology, leads to theory incommensurability, and is unclear about when concepts are the same or different. I propose that an alternative “black box essentialist” account of theoretical concepts, drawn from recent philosophical work on natural kind concepts, better explains how we manage to refer to the same construct even as our theories and criteria change. One implication is that Meehl is incorrect to claim that a reason for psychology’s lack of progress is that its concepts are inherently different from those in the hard sciences.     

The evolution and psychology of self-deception

In this article we argue that self-deception evolved to facilitate interpersonal deception by allowing people to avoid the cues to conscious deception that might reveal deceptive intent. Self-deception has two additional advantages: It eliminates the costly cognitive load that is typically associated with deceiving, and it can minimize retribution if the deception is discovered. Beyond its role in specific acts of deception, self-deceptive self-enhancement also allows people to display more confidence than is warranted, which has a host of social advantages. The question then arises of how the self can be both deceiver and deceived. We propose that this is achieved through dissociations of mental processes, including conscious versus unconscious memories, conscious versus unconscious attitudes, and automatic versus controlled processes. Given the variety of methods for deceiving others, it should come as no surprise that self-deception manifests itself in a number of different psychological processes, and we discuss various types of self-deception. We then discuss the interpersonal versus intrapersonal nature of self-deception before considering the levels of consciousness at which the self can be deceived. Finally, we contrast our evolutionary approach to self-deception with current theories and debates in psychology and consider some of the costs associated with self-deception.