Distinguished Senior Psychologist Forum.

The article draws on various areas in arguing that personality psychologists need to reconsider the potential utility of personality types. The Distinguished Senior Psychologist Forum in the Journal of Personality invites a senior researcher to present his or her views on some aspect of personality psychology. The nature of the forum is not fixed, however, the goal of the forum is to generate interesting perspectives on a wide variety of issues in personality psychology. The forum encourages articles that tend to be speculative, broadbrush and/or historical in nature. The third article in the series is by Professor Paul E. Meehl of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Meehl has won numerous prestigious awards, including the American Psychological Association's distinguished contributor award and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of many well-known articles and chapters, a distinguished sample of which are reprinted in Psychodiagnosis: Selected Papers in 1973 and Selected Philosophical and Methodological Papers in 1991. In the article, Meehl offers several examples and definitions of taxa, then considers a variety of methods for detecting and validating putative taxa.