Chapter One
Representational Measurement Theory
R. DUNCAN LUCE AND PATRICK SUPPES
CONCEPT OF REPRESENTATIONAL
MEASUREMENT
Representational measurement is, on the one
hand, an attempt to understand the nature of
empirical observations that can be usefully
recoded, in some reasonably unique fashion,
in terms of familiar mathematical structures.
The most common of these representing structures
are the ordinary real numbers ordered in
the usual way and with the operations of addition,
+, and/or multiplication, -. Intuitively,
such representations seems a possibility when
dealing with variables for which people have
a clear sense of "greater than." When data can
be summarized numerically, our knowledge
of how to calculate and to relate numbers can
usefully come into play. However, as we will
see, caution must be exerted not to go beyond
the information actually coded numerically. In
addition, more complex mathematical structures
such as geometries are often used, for
example, in multidimensional scaling.
On the other hand, representational measurement
goes well beyond the mere construction
of numerical representations to a careful
examination of how such ... read full excerpt from Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology, Volume 4 ebook
