The Ongoing Dialog between Empirical Science and Measurement Theory

Abstract

This review article attempts to highlight from my personal perspective some of the major developments in the representational theory of measurement during the past 50 years. Emphasis is placed on the ongoing interplay between the development of abstract theory and the attempts to apply it to empirically testable phenomena. The article has four major sections. The first concerns classical representational measurement, which was the successful attempt to formulate the major measurement methods of classical physics: extensive and additive conjoint structures, their distributive interlock in dimensional analysis, and intensive (averaging) structures. The second illustrates a nontrivial behavioral example using both extensive and conjoint measurement plus functional equations to arrive at rank- and sign-dependent utility (also called cumulative prospect) representations for decision making under risk. The third section, contemporary representational measurement, somewhat overlaps the classical one but includes new findings and approaches: representations of nonadditive concatenation and conjoint structures; a general theory of scale types; results for general, finitely unique, homogeneous structures; structures that are homogeneous between singular points; generalized distributive triples; and a generalization of dimensional analysis to include any ratio scalable attribute; and the concept of meaningfulness. The final section concerns applications of the latter ideas to psychophysical scaling and merging functions