Second-order relevance.

By beginning with a couple of anecdotes, I may seem to be contradicting myself, since I shall assume that training in scientific psychology (as in law, engineering, etc.) has an appreciable tendency to help people think better, at least on some topics and in some respects. To most psychologists, “thinking better ” includes discounting “anecdotal evidence. ” So let me emphasize that these anecdotes are mainly illustrative of this educational assumption, and are not being offered as strong evidence for it. First anecdote: I am chairman of a search committee to find a new dean for the University of Minnesota Law School. At the first session of that committee, I was struck—as I have been frequently in lunch table conversations at the Faculty Club—with the incisiveness, clarity, directedness, and high relevancy level of my legal brethren’s discussions, even at such a pre-liminary stage. For example, when, on a (happily rare) occasion, one of the law professors began wandering a bit by anticipating an improbable contingency, he was cut off gently but firmly by another’s brief remark, “We don’t reach that issue. ” Those of you familiar with appellate court opinions will recognize this locution as the way courts avoid talking about something they neither need nor wish to talk about, because it turns out that something else comes first and