Because physical theories typically predict numerical values, an improvement in experimental precision reduces the tolerance range and hence increases corroborability. In most psychological research, improved power of a statistical design leads to a prior probability approaching 1/2 of finding a significant difference in the theoretically predicted direction. Hence the corroboration yielded by "success" is very weak, and becomes weaker with increased precision. "Statistical significance" plays a logical role in psychology precisely the reverse of its role in physics. This problem is (...) worsened by certain unhealthy tendencies prevalent among psychologists, such as a premium placed on experimental "cuteness" and a free reliance upon ad hoc explanations to avoid refutation. (shrink)

Statistical procedures can be applied to episodes in the history of science in order to weight attributes to predict short-term survival of theories; an asymptotic method is used to show that short-term survival is a valid proxy for ultimate survival; and a theoretical argument is made that ultimate survival is a valid proxy for objective truth. While realists will appreciate this last step, instrumentalists do not need it to benefit from the actuarial procedures of cliometric metatheory. Introduction A plausible proxy (...) for Peircean consensus Assessing the validity of theory attributes as predictors of theory survival 3.1 Linear discriminant function 3.2 Factor analysis 3.3 Taxometric analysis Verisimilitude index Satisfying both instrumentalists and realists Recapitulation Implementation of cliometric metatheory * Correspondence about this article may be addressed to Leslie Yonce at pemeehle{at}umn.edu' + u + '@' + d + ''//--> This article had been completed by Paul Meehl at the time of his death on 14 February 2003. His wife, Leslie J. Yonce, is grateful to Keith Gunderson (University of Minnesota, Center for Philosophy of Science) and Niels G. Waller (Psychology Department, Vanderbilt University) for advice with some final editing details. (shrink)

More powerful methods for studying and integrating the historical track record of scientific episodes and scientific judgment, or what Faust and Meehl describe as a program of meta‐science and meta‐scientific studies, can supplement and extend more commonly used case study methods. We describe the basic premises of meta‐science, overview methodological considerations, and provide examples of meta‐scientific studies. Meta‐science can help to clarify or resolve long‐standing questions in the history and philosophy of science and provide practical help to the working (...) scientist. (shrink)

Paul E. Meehl and B. F. Skinner, two of the foremost psychological theorists of the 20th century, overlapped at the University of Minnesota in the early 1940s when Skinner was a faculty member and Meehl was a graduate student. Though Skinner was well aware of, and influenced by, early 20th century physiology, he eschewed reductionism, developing his analysis of behavior without reference to concepts at another level of analysis. Meehl's theoretical approach transcended levels of analysis, drawing (...) upon data and concepts from genetics, neuroscience, and psychology. In this paper the functional components of Meehl's (1990) "Toward an Integrated Theory of Schizotaxia, Schizotypy, and Schizophrenia" paper are re-formulated substituting autism as the condition of interest. Skinner's and Meehl's theoretical frameworks are integrated with recent findings in genetics and neuroscience in an attempt to better understand the reasons why Intensive Early Behavior Therapy (IEBT) provided to children with Autism Spectrum Disorders produces enduring improvements in social, language, and cognitive functioning. (shrink)

Simon Saunders and David Wallace attempt to use a modified form of David Lewis's analysis of personal fission to ground the claim that prior to undergoing Everett branching an informed subject can be uncertain about which outcome s/he will observe. I argue that a central assumption of this seductive idea is questionable despite appearing innocuous and that at the very least further argument is needed in support of it. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

Three aspects of the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics are considered. It is first shown that the proof of the metatheorem is not complete—thus it is an open question as to whether or not it is true. Next, some difficulties for the Everett interpretation and the metatheorem, which arise from consideration of the physics developed by observers in maverick universes, are discussed. Finally, it is shown that the universal state description of an ever-branching universe with each branch corresponding (...) to a possible perceived universe fails completely in the limit of an infinite number of successive branchings. (shrink)

How does it come about then, that great scientists such as Einstein, Schrödinger and De Broglie are nevertheless dissatisfied with the situation? Of course, all these objections are levelled not against the correctness of the formulae, but against their interpretation. [...] The lesson to be learned from what I have told of the origin of quantum mechanics is that probable refinements of mathematical methods will not suffice to produce a satisfactory theory, but that somewhere in our doctrine is hidden a (...) concept, unjustified by experience, which we must eliminate to open up the road. (Born [ 1954 ], pp. 8, 11) It is truly surprising how little difference all this makes. Most physicists use quantum mechanics every day in their working lives without needing to worry about the fundamental problem of its interpretation. (Weinberg [ 1992 ], p. 66) I endorse the view that it may be of no relevance to the acceptability of the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics as a physical theory whether or not an informed observer can be uncertain about the outcome of a quantum measurement prior to its having occurred. However, I suggest that the very possibility of post-measurement, pre-observation uncertainty has an essential role to play in both confirmation theory and decision theory in a branching universe. This is supported by arguments which do not appeal to van Fraassen’s Reflection Principle. (shrink)

Analysis of sites of newly integrated DNA in cellular genomes is important to several fields, but methods for analyzing and visualizing these datasets are still under development. Here, we describe tools for data analysis and visualization that take as input integration site data from our INSPIIRED pipeline. Paired-end sequencing allows inference of the numbers of transduced cells as well as the distributions of integration sites in target genomes. We present interactive heatmaps that allow comparison of distributions of integration sites to (...) genomic features and that support numerous user-defined statistical tests. To summarize integration site data from human gene therapy samples, we developed a reproducible report format that catalogs sample population structure, longitudinal dynamics, and integration frequency near cancer-associated genes. We also introduce a novel summary statistic, the UC50, which provides a single number summarizing possible clonal expansion. Using these tools, we characterize ongoing longitudinal characterization of a patient from the first trial to treat severe combined immunodeficiency-X1, showing successful reconstitution for 15 years accompanied by persistence of a cell clone with an integration site near the cancer-associated gene CCND2. Software is available at https://github.com/BushmanLab/INSPIIRED. (shrink)

Objective probability in quantum mechanics is often thought to involve a stochastic process whereby an actual future is selected from a range of possibilities. Everett’s seminal idea is that all possible definite futures on the pointer basis exist as components of a macroscopic linear superposition. I demonstrate that these two conceptions of what is involved in quantum processes are linked via two alternative interpretations of the mind-body relation. This leads to a fission, rather than divergence, interpretation of Everettian theory (...) and to a novel explanation of why a principle of indifference does not apply to self-location uncertainty for a post-measurement, pre-observation subject, just as Sebens and Carroll claim. Their Epistemic Separability Principle is shown to arise out of this explanation and the derivation of the Born rule for Everettian theory is thereby put on a firmer footing. (shrink)

Proposed derivations of the Born rule for Everettian theory are controversial. I argue that they are unnecessary but may provide justification for a simplified version of the Principal Principle. It’s also unnecessary to replace Everett’s idea that a subject splits in measurement contexts with the idea that subjects have linear histories which partition Many worlds? Everett, quantum theory, and reality, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 181–205, 2010; Wallace in The emergent multiverse, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, Chapter 7; (...) Wilson in Br J Philos Sci 64:709–737, 2013; The nature of contingency: quantum physics as modal realism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, forthcoming). Linear histories were introduced to provide a concept of pre-measurement uncertainty and I explain why pre-measurement uncertainty for splitting subjects is after all coherent, though not necessary because Everett’s original fission interpretation of branching can arguably be rendered coherent without it, via reference to Vaidman, Tappenden, Sebens and Carroll and McQueen and Vaidman. A deterministic and probabilistic quantum mechanics can be made intelligible by replacing the standard collapse postulate with a no-collapse postulate which identifies objective probability with relative branch weight, supplemented by the simplified Principal Principle and some revisionary metaphysics. (shrink)

Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle have made an original proposal for a version of decoherent histories quantum mechanics which is specifically tailored so as not to imply the emergence of multiple quasi-classical worlds. I argue that there is an explanatory gap in the proposal but that there remains an important insight which might be used to tackle what can be seen as an outstanding problem for Hugh Everett III’s “relative state” interpretation of quantum mechanics, if it is understood as (...) giving ontic priority to the wavefunction. The argument employs a recent novel analysis of self-location within any sort of multiverse. (shrink)

I continue to maintain that David Lewis’s concept of overlapping persons cannot yield pre-measurement uncertainty in the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics in the way that Simon Saunders and David Wallace originally seemed to suggest. However, I argue that in their reply to me they make it clear that they do not wish to invoke overlap of persons after all. That makes it mysterious why they defended their interpretation of personal overlap in the first place and questionable what role (...) overlap has to play in their proposal. If Everettian branching can be understood to involve the divergence of distinct, non-overlapping worlds a concept of pre-measurement uncertainty is available. That idea was first proposed by David Deutsch but required an ad hoc postulate. Saunders has recently suggested that a similar scheme arises naturally out of the physics. If correct, that is important as it offers escape from some bizarre consequences of current alternative ways of understanding probability in the Everett interpretation. (shrink)

It is difficult to overestimate Paul Meehl’s influence on judgment and decision-making research. His ‘disturbing little book’ (Meehl, 1986, p. 370) Clinical versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence (1954) is known as an attack on human judgment and a call for replacing clinicians with actuarial methods. More than 40 years later, fast and frugal heuristics—proposed as models of human judgment—were formalized, tested, and found to be surprisingly accurate, often more so than (...) the actuarial models that Meehl advocated. We ask three questions: Do the findings of the two programs contradict each other? More generally, how are the programs conceptually connected? Is there anything they can learn from each other? After demonstrating that there need not be a contradiction, we show that both programs converge in their concern to develop (a) domain-specific models of judgment and (b) nonlinear process models that arise from the bounded nature of judgment. We then elaborate the differences between the programs and discuss how these differences can be viewed as mutually instructive: First, we show that the fast and frugal.. (shrink)

It is difficult to overestimate Paul Meehl's influence on judgment and decision-making research. His 'disturbing little book' Clinical versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence is known as an attack on human judgment and a call for replacing clinicians with actuarial methods. More than 40 years later, fast and frugal heuristics - proposed as models of human judgment - were formalized, tested, and found to be surprisingly accurate, often more so than the actuarial (...) models that Meehl advocated. We ask three questions: Do the findings of the two programs contradict each other? More generally, how are the programs conceptually connected? Is there anything they can learn from each other? After demonstrating that there need not be a contradiction, we show that both programs converge in their concern to develop domain-specific models of judgment and nonlinear process models that arise from the bounded nature of judgment. We then elaborate the differences between the programs and discuss how these differences can be viewed as mutually instructive: First, we show that the fast and frugal heuristic models can help bridge the clinical - actuarial divide, that is, they can be developed into actuarial methods that are both accurate and easy to implement by the unaided clinical judge. We then argue that Meehl's insistence on improving judgment makes clear the importance of examining the degree to which heuristics are used in the clinical domain and how acceptable they would be as actuarial tools. (shrink)

The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis was first published in 1956. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This first volume of Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science presents some of the relatively more consolidated research of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. The work of the Center, which was established in 1953 through a (...) grant from the Louis W. and Maud Hill Family Foundation, has so far been devoted largely to the philosophical, logical, and methodological problems of psychology. Some of the twelve papers in this volume are concerned with broad philosophical foundations; others consider specific problems of method or interpretation. The contributors, some of whom are represented in the authorship of more than one paper, are Herbert Feigl, director of the Center; Rudolf Carnap; B.F. Skinner; Michael Scriven; Albert Ellis; Antony Flew; L. J. Cronbach; Paul E. Meehl; R. C. Buck; and Wilfrid Sellars. (shrink)

Analyses of Theories and Methods of Physics and Psychology was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This is Volume IV of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, a series published in cooperation with the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota and edited by Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell. Dr. Feigl was the (...) director of the Center.In a preface to the first volume in the series, Professors Feigl and Michael Scriven noted the extensive concern of the Center with "the meaning of theoretical concepts as defined by their locus in the 'nomological net' and the related rejection of the reductionist forms of operationism and positivism." In this volume, several contributors are again concerned with philosophical, logical, and methodological problems of psychology. As before, some papers deal with broad philosophical issues, others with more specific problems of method or interpretation. However, a deep concern for logical and methodological problems of special relevance to the physical sciences is reflected in a number of essays.The contents are arranged in two sections, the first part being based on the papers and discussion from a conference held at the Center on the problems of correspondence rules. Contributors are Herbert Feigl, Paul K. Feyerabend, N.R. Hanson, Carl G. Hempel, Mary Hesse, Grover Maxwell, and William Rozeboom. The second group of essays, by various members of the staff of the Center and some of its visitors, reflects current issues and controversies of great interest. The contributors are William Demopoulos, Keith Gunderson, Paul E. Meehl (three essays), and Michael Radner. (shrink)

The first three volumes of the Minnesota Studies have become recent classics. They contain some of the most important and philosophically suggestive papers published during the fifties and early sixties. Some of the discussions which are the basis of volume IV took place in 1966 and a number of the papers here seem "dated"--at least to the extent that discussion of the relevant issues has been superseded by publication in other places. There is still another tour de force by (...) class='Hi'>Paul K. Feyerabend, who is becoming more strident and more anarchistic in his politics, epistemology, and philosophy of science. There is a brief paper by the late N. R. Hanson and a typically solid and balanced defense of the "standard conception" of scientific theories by Carl G. Hempel. Three papers by Paul E. Meehl are included which, as usual, excel in the care and clarity of argument--even though there seems to be little that is new here. And there is also an informed discussion of correspondence rules by a number of participants in a special conference dedicated to this subject. While the quality of the papers is high, this volume nevertheless lacks some of the excitement and novelty of the earlier volumes.--R. J. B. (shrink)

Like John Skrentny, Paul Gottfried sees in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the seeds of Affirmative Action, racial and gender asides, quotas, goals and timetables. He contends that this was “the likely way that the Act would be interpreted.” But an act written in part in the office of Republican Senator Everett Dirksen and amended by the conservative Texas Republican John Tower was not necessarily, nor even likely, to be converted into the AA commissariat machine. Because it (...) turned out that way, does not mean this was the only, or even the probable, outcome. There was a dire need for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because employers, particularly in the South, refused to hire blacks even when they were better qualified than whites. (shrink)

The “official” history of connexive logic was written in 2012 by Storrs McCall who argued that connexive logic was founded by ancient logicians like Aristotle, Chrysippus, and Boethius; that it was further developed by medieval logicians like Abelard, Kilwardby, and Paul of Venice; and that it was rediscovered in the 19th and twentieth century by Lewis Carroll, Hugh MacColl, Frank P. Ramsey, and Everett J. Nelson. From 1960 onwards, connexive logic was finally transformed into non-classical calculi which partly (...) concur with systems of relevance logic and paraconsistent logic. In this paper it will be argued that McCall’s historical analysis is fundamentally mistaken since it doesn’t take into account two versions of connexivism. While “humble” connexivism maintains that connexive properties only apply to “normal” antecedents, “hardcore” connexivism insists that they also hold for “abnormal” propositions. It is shown that the overwhelming majority of the forerunners of connexive logic were only “humble” connexivists. Their ideas concerning connexive implication don’t give rise, however, to anything like a non-classical logic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.4 (2004) 357-359 [Access article in PDF] A Madness for the Philosophy of Psychiatry John Z. Sadler His enthusiasm brimming over with the rich set of ideas and problems he has discovered, Louis Charland's essay on identity, ethics, and the Internet should be grist for the philosophy of psychiatry mill for years. Indeed, a brief commentary cannot answer the many questions raised by his paper. (...) In response, I would like to focus on two general issues for this essay. Labels, Diagnoses, Reference, Experiences Many psychiatrists will take issue with Charland's use of the term label in reference to mental disorder concepts in this paper. I did not, but his relatively uncritical use of the labels and labeling terms in his essay prompts me to unpack some concepts that lurk behind the many other conceptual issues raised here. Psychiatric "labels" and "labeling" have a derogatory sense for many psychiatrists, because they are associated with a virulent antipsychiatry temperament dating back to the 1960s, at least in the United States (Sadler 2003). For many clinicians (as well as others) labeling implies that there is nothing more to psychiatric diagnosis and "mental illness" than the names given to various sorts of human diversity. This sort of psychiatric nominalism, the viewpoint goes, serves to pigeonhole people for the purposes, primarily, of political control or power. Charland's own viewpoint is more subtle than this, illustrated by his discussion of Hacking's "looping effects" and the related idea that social factors are influential in the manifestations, even causation, of mental disorders, but are not exhaustive in explaining mental disorders. However, because the whole matter of social construction of clinical phenomena is at the heart of Charland's discussion, further consideration of this metaphysical territory is warranted.The notion of a mental disorder concept as "label" betrays little about what, substantively, mental disorders are. A label on a can of peas tells us little, ultimately, about the nature of the contents; indeed, it is only a clue. When we shift labeling from a can of peas to a person—a self—then such a shallow clue to the "contents" of a person is an offensive simplification of a person's identity and selfhood. Hence the railing against psychiatric labeling in the 1960s through today.The general goals for psychiatric diagnosis and classification in systems like DSM-IV is are multiple, but at minimum, such denotations of clinical conditions are intended to advance the generation of knowledge about the conditions as well as provide a "shorthand" for clinicians in communicating about and understanding patients' conditions. How successful these diagnostic classification systems are for these and other purposes is a discussion for another time, but the [End Page 357] point here is that some sort of method of characterizing people's distresses is a precondition for understanding and explaining such distresses. The scientific processes of validation of psychiatric categories, at core, are to ensure that, as Gorenstein notes (1992), our clinical concepts are not empty, self-fulfilling prophecies, but rather refer to other, hopefully predictable, features of the patient's distress. Such validation of clinical "constructs" is the basis for developing and testing specific treatments, as well as understanding more richly and deeply the clinical phenomenon. To have a label, then, under this view, is to have an empty nominalization, which is offensive and scientifically vapid. To have a diagnostic construct—a disorder—is to have a concept which empirically refers to, as Paul Meehl put it, a "nomological network" of predictable, lawlike, implications (Sadler 2004a).However, as Charland, Hacking, and others have noted, the reflexivity of the human self and our ultimately crude ways of characterizing selves leads to a serious problem, even for the most rigorously validated psychological categories. That problem is the changeability of the self, the capacity of people to remake themselves according to their own ideas along with the sociocultural ether of ideas that surrounds us all. This means that our understanding of mental disorders, both as aggregates of features, and well as individual patients over time, are "moving targets," the... (shrink)

Based on an analysis of ten popular introductions to social psychology, we will show that Karl Popper's philosophy of ‘critical rationalism’ so far has had little to no traceable influence on the epistemology and practice of social psychology. If Popper is quoted or mentioned in the textbooks at all, the guiding principle of ‘falsificationism’ is reduced to a mere ‘falsifiability’ and some central elements of critical rationalism are left out – those that are incompatible with positivism and inductivism. Echoing earlier (...) attempts to introduce Popper to social psychology by Paul Meehl and Tom Pettigrew, we will argue that a discussing Popper's ideas in more depth could help social psychology to move forward in view of the ‘crisis of confidence’ that has emerged recently in view of the ‘Stapel affair’ and the reports of failures to replicate social psychological experiments in high-powered replication attempts. (shrink)

That there is a sucker born every minute is the cynical slogan most often attributed to the great nineteenth-century circus entreprenuer Phineas Taylor Barnum. Though there is in fact no record that he ever made such a remark, Barnum did claim that his success depended on providing in his shows “a little something for everybody.” Both the cynicism and his recipe for success are relevant to understanding the persistent tendency for people to embrace fake personality descriptions as uniquely their own. (...) This in turn gives a particular aptness to Paul Meehl’s phrase, the Barnum Effect, to describe the phenomenon.19.. (shrink)

Responds to the comments by F. Paniagua on the current author's original article, "Meehl revisited: A look at paradigms in psychology" , in which the current author reviewed Paul Meehl's famous article "Theroetical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl; Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of soft psychology." According to the current author, Paniagua takes exception to two casual remarks made in the current author's paper, one about Kuhn and the other about Skinner, but neither remark is (...) related to the actual thesis. Paniagua's comments do not carry the substantive aspects of the article forward, which is unfortunate asserts the current author, because the theory discussed therein may prove useful in understanding the nature and evolution of psychology. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In Studies on Early Modern Aristotelianism Paul Richard Blum shows that Aristotle’s thought remained the touchstone of modern philosophy; for it was the philosophy taught at universities. The concept of philosophy at Jesuit schools forms the first part of this book. Their impact on the sciences and mathematics in combination with Renaissance ideas of nature is the topic of the second part. The transformation of Aristotelian metaphysics and theology under the influence of the Renaissance is the third area of (...) this book. Surprising continuity from the late Middle Ages into modernity and the radical difference of subject centered modern philosophy from ‘teachable’ school philosophy are innovative in these studies. (shrink)