Let’s Be Careful Out There: Reply to Commentaries

On Sustaining Critical Discourse with Mainstream Personality Investigators

“…In particular, the above-cited articles by Wittig (1982), Jackson (1986a, 1986b), Dar and Serlin (1990), and Ozer (1990), all of which were written as attempts to refute some aspect(s) of my challenge to the validity of traditional thinking in personality research, revealed numerous misunderstandings of-and internally contradictory assertions about-the statistical concepts and measurement operations that are utterly foundational for studies of individual differences. 2 What is more, and what I certainly had not anticipated, my subsequent clarifications of those misunderstandings and internal contradictions (Lamiell, 1982a(Lamiell, , 1990bLamiell & Trierweiler, 1986) were in turn neither rejoined nor conceded. Instead, the conversation simply stopped, and traditional research practices have since continued as if no challenge to their validity and conceptual coherence had ever been mounted at all.…”

“…Lamiell, 1982aLamiell, , 1986aLamiell, , 1991Lamiell & Trierweiler, 1986), book chapters (e.g. Lamiell, 1982bLamiell, , 1986bLamiell, , 1986cLamiell, , 1990aLamiell, , 1990bLamiell, , 1992, and a book (Lamiell, 1987). Not surprisingly, my central claims were met with skeptical reactions among mainstream researchers (e.g.…”

“…To cite just one example here: Dar and Serlin (1990) criticized me for discussing correlations of the sort generated through studies of individual differences in terms of means and standard deviations, instead of in terms of the 'usual' parameters of correlational analyses, regression slopes and additive constants (Lamiell, 1990a). I had thus to remind them in my rejoinder (Lamiell, 1990b) that regression slopes and additive constants are themselves defined in terms of means and standard deviations! 3.…”

Valuation theory, the self‐confrontation method, and scientific personality psychology

“…For Windelband, nomothetic knowledge in the domain of personality would have been constituted of general laws concerning the functioning of and hence relevant to an understanding of individual person^.^ As general laws in the sense intended by Windelband, therefore, such laws would apply to any given individual person, because individual persons would be the entities over which a general law of personality functioning would have to hold. Yet as I have discussed at length elsewhere [most recently, Lamiell (1990a); see also critical commentaries by Dar and Serlin (1990), Ozer (1990), and Fisher (1990), as well as my (Lamiell, 1990b) reply thereto], mainstream personality psychology's ersatz 'general laws' are not about individuals. Nor is this merely to say that those 'laws' do not knowably pertain to all individuals.…”