Paul E. Meehl: Brains, Facts, and Passion

Reviews the books, Thinking Clearly About Psychology: Essays in Honor of Paul E. Meehl, Vol. 1: Matters of Public Interest by Dante Cicchetti and William M. Grove (Eds.) (see record 1992-98084-000); and Thinking Clearly About Psychology: Essays in Honor of Paul E. Meehl, Vol. 2: Personality and Psychopathology by Dante Cicchetti and William M. Grove (Eds.) (see record 1992-98084-000). The contributors to these two volumes give readers a large number of examples of another of Meehl's lasting contributions to psychology, the polar opposite of cognitive slippage, stated as his goal in life and labeled a clean rhetoric some years ago by one of my very bright schizotypic psychotherapy patients. More appropriately, given Meehl's overarching contribution to the mind business and to science, the main title of both volumes is Thinking Clearly About Psychology, and most all the contributors are masters of a clean rhetoric. The content of these two books makes them well worth careful study. The first section is a particularly well arranged three-chapter introduction to Meehl's view of psychology and science. The final section, labeled Psychopathology, is quite a mix. Meehl will be most pleased and certainly most fully honored by the fact that a good number of these chapters will soon appear, right beside his own classics, in the syllabi for rigorous graduate courses in psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)