Article ID: CBB000770733

Psychophysics, Intensive Magnitudes, and the Psychometricians' Fallacy (2006)

unapi

As an aspiring science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, psychology pursued quantification. A problem was that degrees of psychological attributes (most importantly, then, intensities of sensations) were experienced only as greater than, less than, or equal to one another. They were categorised as intensive magnitudes. The meaning of this concept was shifting, from that of an attribute possessing underlying quantitative structure (the medieval and Kantian meaning) to that of a merely ordinal attribute (its dominant twentieth-century meaning). This fluidity allowed psychologists to claim that their attributes were intensive magnitudes (because ordered) and measurable (because intensive magnitudes). This claim was supported by an argument that order entails quantity. As adapted by psychometricians, the argument was that if an attribute is ordered, then the differences between its degrees are quantitative and, therefore, measurable. However, in a paper ignored in psychology for six decades, the issue was resolved mathematically and the resolution implies that the psychometricians' argument was fallacious.

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Authors & Contributors
Christensen, Alice R.
Ling, Biying
Doria, Corinne
Mark Paterson
Heller-Roazen, Daniel
Tamborini, Marco
Concepts
Psychology
Senses and sensation; perception
Measurement
Quantification
Experimental psychology
Development of science; change in science
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
18th century
20th century, late
17th century
Places
United States
Germany
Switzerland
Spain
Geneva (Switzerland)
Great Britain
Institutions
Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas (Spain)
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