View of a Supportive Empiricist

My qualifications for writing a comment on the excellent article by Paul Meehl are limited. My impressions, accumulated during more than 50 years of reading and writing research articles, are that neither the philosophy nor the history of science has served to improve the quality of poor research or guide good research. I have relegated these disciplines to the task of making sensible and formalizing after the fact what good scientists have accomplished. The fact that physical scientists, by and large, are much less concerned about the philosophy of science than psychologists reinforced my position. It seems that concern about such matters is an attribute of an immature science. I did read Kuhn's (1962) discussion of paradigm shifts shortly after his book appeared. It not only reinforced my attitude about the function of philosophers of science, but about the scientific immaturity of many psychologists as well. The paradigm shift has been used to justify doing anything and everything except science. That I find Meehl's presentations attractive is not a conversion phenomenon, because I arrived at similar views by a different route (Humphreys, 1985). That this was done without reading widely in the philosophy of science-my tally is zero for almost every name Meehl cites-may be important. He mentions in one context a broad, shared common-sense among scientists. This may provide for an intuitive grasp of the issues that some philosophors of science explicate more fully and formally.