Paul Meehl - Philosophical Psychology Lecture 1/12

Lecture by Paul Meehl on January 5th, 1989 at the University of Minnesota. Introductory lecture for a course on philosophical psychology, or psychological meta-theory. In this lecture Meehl lays out the scope of the course and speaks about the history of the major movements the course will cover, including logical positivism, behaviorism and operationism. Also introduces his critique of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing in its weak form used in soft sciences.

Notes:
14:00 At the time Hegel was writing his PhD thesis many astronomers were searching for a planet between Mars and Jupiter because of an apparent pattern in the orbits of the planets known as Bode's law which fit the semi-major axes of the planets to a numeric series with one term missing. Hegel criticized this on the grounds that the orbits could be fit to another series without a missing term. In 1801 Hegel published this argument in his thesis, and in the same year Ceres was discovered in between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter (it was classified first as a planet, then an asteroid, now as a dwarf planet). However Hegel never claimed that there could only be 7 planets, just that the arguments for an 8th planet in that position were weak, but this is a frequently repeated story.

57:20 Herbert Feigl: "Watson made up his windpipe that he had no mind"

1:01:48 The recording loops backwards here. Sorry about that, it's in the original recording.