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Abstract
What is a valid measuring instrument? Recent philosophy has attended to logic of justification of measures, such as construct validation, but not to the question of what it means for an instrument to be a valid measure of a construct. A prominent approach grounds validity in the existence of a causal link between the attribute and its detectable manifestations. Some of its proponents claim that, therefore, validity does not depend on pragmatics and research context. In this paper, I cast doubt on the possibility of a context-independent causal account of validity (what I call unconditional validity). I assess several versions, arguing that all of them fail to judge the validity of measuring instruments correctly. Because different research purposes require different properties from measuring instruments, no account of validity succeeds without referring to the specific research purpose that creates the need for measurement in the first place.
Highlights
What is a valid measurement? When are measuring instruments or procedures valid? In everyday research, ‘valid’ connotes the approval of a measuringReceived 10 October 2020Philosophy of the Social Sciences 51(2)instrument
This intuitive idea has been made precise in quite distinct ways by different authors, and there is no settled consensus on a preferred account
Why do we want a concept of measurement validity? What do we want it for? As already hinted at, we need this concept for certifying measuring instruments
Summary
What is a valid measurement? When are measuring instruments or procedures valid? In everyday research, ‘valid’ connotes the approval of a measuring. The intuitive idea behind the notion of validity consists in whether an instrument measures the construct at stake (originally stated in Kelley 1927). This intuitive idea has been made precise in quite distinct ways by different authors, and there is no settled consensus on a preferred account. The intended contrast here are the leading accounts of validity in educational research (e.g., Kane 2006; Messick 1989) These accounts define validity in ways that include the possible interpretations and usages to which the measurement results would be put. I show in section 6 that no unconditional account of validity succeeds
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