Why force a square peg into a round hole? The ongoing (pseudo-)problem of psychological measurement

Abstract

In this commentary on Borgstede and Eggert’s article “Squaring the Circle: From Latent Variables to Theory-Based Measurement,” (2023) three problematic areas of their proposed psychological measurement framework are identified. These pertain, respectively, to (a) confusions regarding the meaning of “meaning”; (b) vagueness and ambiguity in Borgstede and Eggert’s theory-based measurement framework; and (c) the decidedly thin promise of the aim of replacing ordinary “folk” psychological concepts with theoretically defined formalisms. The commentary concludes with the suggestion that building a psychological measurement framework on the model of the physical sciences may be likely to create more problems than it solves.

Keywords

definition meaning psychological concepts psychological measurement Wittgenstein

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