The Consequence of Sustaining a Pathology: Scientific Stagnation-a Commentary on the Target Article 'Is Psychometrics a Pathological Science?' by Joel Michell

摘要

For more than 20 years now, Joel Michell has carefully explicated the properties and requirements of quantitative measurement, in books, papers, conference papers, and workshops. In 1997, he published what was essentially one of the most important papers in the whole of psychology for a generation, titled "Quantitative Science and the Definition of Measurement in Psychology." As Michell notes in his target article, the response from psychologists and psychometricians alike has been largely silence. From my own attempts to relay his thesis in papers, conferences, and academic seminars, I have been met with a mixture of disbelief, disinterest, anger, accusations of intellectual nihilism, ridicule, and generally a steadfast refusal to seriously question the facts. And, make no mistake, Michell deals with facts about measurement. The only coherent responses I have read where the author made a passable attempt at really engaging with MiehelPs work was in the book Measurement: Theory and Practice by Hand (2004), a mathematical statistician and machine learning expert, and Borsboom and Mellenbergh (2004) in a direct response to the paper published earlier by Michell (2000).