ABSTRACT
Recently, I read an article in the Psychological Bulletin summarizing the research literature on a theory in personology. I had some interest in it both for its intrinsic importance and because the theorist is an old friend and former academic colleague. The reviewer seemed scrupulously fair in dealing with the evidence and arguments, and I do not believe any reader could discern even faint evidence of bias pro or con. The empirical evidence on this theory has now accumulated to a considerable mass of factual reports and associated theoretical inferences, so we are not dealing with a recently advanced conjecture on which the evidence is sparse in amount or confined to too narrow a fact domain. Despite this large mass of data and the scholarly attributes of the reviewer, upon completing the reading I found myself puzzled as to what a rational mind ought to conclude about the state of the evidence. Given all these facts and arguments based upon them, pulled together by a reviewer of competence and objectivity, am I prepared to say that my friend X's theory has been refuted, or strongly corroborated, or is in some vague epistemic region in between? If, taken as it stands, the theory seems to have been refuted, is it nevertheless doing well enough, considering the whole fact domain and the plausible explanations of some seeming predictive failures, so that we should continue to investigate it and try to patch it up (i.e., does it seem to have enough verisimilitude to warrant occupying psychologists with amending it so its verisimilitude may increase)? Or, is the state of the evidence such a mess conceptually and interpretatively that perhaps the thing to do is to give it up as a bad job and start working on something else?
