Stevens's theory of scales of measurement and its place in modern psychology

Abstract

Stevens's theory of scales of measurement has been an important methodological resource within psychology for half a century. It advanced the representational theory of measurement and promised to open up to scientific investigation the issue of the structure of psychological attributes. Its development by Suppes and Zinnes and the axiomatic measurement theory tradition showed how that promise could be fulfilled. However, neither Stevens nor the psychometricians who adopted his theory used it in that way. They used it to foreclose scientific investigation of that issue. This paper examines the way in which this was done and offers reasons for it.

This is a revised version of a paper delivered at the 20th Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August, 2001.

Notes

This is a revised version of a paper delivered at the 20th Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August, 2001.