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What Paul Meehl's name evokes for me is the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, with which he has been associated for all of its career—he helped found it—and most of his. An experimental and clinical psychologist with a philosophical training (who studied under Herbert Feigl, a distinguished exile from Hitler's Europe and a former member of the original Vienna Circle), he has brought fresh and original lines of inquiry to bear on a cluster of problems that lie at the intersection of psychology and the philosophy of mind. Methodologically most of these inquiries belong, as might be expected, to the philosophy of science; the first paper of his that I remember having read and been forcibly stuck by was one on the statistical treatment of rare events. In the volume under review the emphasis is on the philosophy of mind and metapsychology, except for a number of papers near the end that move over into forensics. The volume consists of 19 papers, dating from 1950 to 1989, and a longish introduction. It is a good sampling of the work of someone who deserves attention from clinicians.
For present purposes I will direct attention to the handful of papers in the middle of the book that will be of special interest to psychoanalysts (“Psychopathology and Purpose,” “Some Methodological Reflections on the Difficulties of Psychoanalytic Research,” and “Subjectivity in Psychoanalytic Inference: The Nagging Persistence of Wilhelm Fliess's Achensee Question”). However I do not wish to overlook the rest of the book altogether, and the first paper of all is well placed at the head of the menu, dealing as it does with the systematic difficulties involved in trying to treat “soft” sciences as if they were “hard.”