Paul Meehl’s Vision for Psychology as an MSRP

Authors: Stanford Howdyshell

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37082/IJIRMPS.ICE2MAS-24.7

Short DOI: https://doi.org/g8zsfj

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Abstract: In his 2021 Paper, “The Role of Replication in Psychological Science”, Samuel C. Fletcher argues against Paul Meehl’s view that psychology should be understood through the lens of a Methodology of Science Research Programme (MSRP), in the Lakatosian sense. An MSRP is a scientific theory with a hard core of widely accepted and nigh-unchangeable beliefs at the center of a science, which is then “surrounded” by many auxiliary hypotheses. When falsification occurs, then, the hard core of the theory remains while the auxiliary hypotheses are changed to accommodate the failure to accurately predict the results of a given experiment. Fletcher criticizes MSRPs of being unable to handle largely statistical sciences, such as psychology (which relies mainly on null-hypothesis significance testing), because they do not involve individual instances of falsification or correct prediction as MSRPs require, but instead on correlations within large samples (i.e. a significance test with a correlation of 0.6 and a sample of 100 people would count as 60 correct hypotheses and 40 falsifications). This paper will argue that Meehl’s view agrees with Fletcher insofar as he rejects the compatibility between significance testing and MSRPs. It will develop Meehl’s critique of significance testing and show that simple significance testing is not testing a valid hypothesis within the MSRP of psychology. I will then turn to Meehl’s, unfortunately ignored, plan to develop psychoanalysis into an MSRP to show what a successful hypothesis looks like for Meehl. A successful hypothesis will not be the accurate prediction of a correlation but rather a precise prediction of a value on various scales that represent the phenomena under investigation.

Keywords: Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Psychology, MSRP, Replication Crisis

Paper Id: 7.707

Published On: 2025-01-15

Published In: Special Issue - International Conference on Engineering, Economics, Management and Applied Sciences (January 2025)

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