Joel Michell
Biographic Data
| ID | 546834 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joel Michell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joel |
| FAMILY NAME | Michell |
| SIGNATURE | MICHELL J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6827-4783 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 99 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1900 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Mystery of Missing Psychometric Corpus
Psychometrics, the science sustaining psychological test construction and use, has consistently ignored logical criticism of its foundations, even though science as a cognitive enterprise requires criticism. This accumulating corpus of criticisms is generally unacknowledged in histories of the discipline, in textbooks, and in course curricula. Thus, there is a mystery here as to why this critical resource is missing. Considering three critical of…
To psychometrics, from thermometry
Since the 19th century, psychometrics has found false hope in reconstructions of thermometry’s history, as if the former’s failure to investigate whether psychological attributes are quantitative finds justification in the way understandings of temperature unfolded. Since David Sherry’s contribution, a number of psychologists have revived this old chestnut, so there may be merit in discussing the issues raised. First, that of temperature’s quanti…
“Professor Spearman has drawn over-hasty conclusions”
The significance of the dispute between Charles Spearman and Godfrey Thomson over the role of factor analysis in providing unambiguous evidence for Spearman’s two-factor theory has not been recognised for the crucial moment it actually was in the history of psychometrics. Thomson sketched an alternative to Spearman’s theory demonstrating that, factor analysis notwithstanding, there was no need to hypothesise that abilities are quantitative attrib…
Institutional supercycles
We build upon the Minskyan concepts of ‘thwarting mechanisms’ and ‘supercycles’ to develop a framework for analysing the dynamic evolutionary interactions between macrofinancial, institutional and political processes. Thwarting mechanisms are institutional structures that aim to stabilise the macrofinancial system. The effectiveness of these structures changes over time as a result of profit-seeking innovations and long-run destabilising processe…
FX swaps, shadow banks and the global dollar footprint
The era of dollar-based financial globalisation has seen a steady rise in the use of foreign exchange (FX) swaps. We provide a macrofinancial political economy perspective on the geography of FX swaps, and the spatial effects of central bank policies aimed at taming instabilities associated with the uneven geography of the dollar. First, we analyse the mechanisms and potential sources of instability involved in accessing dollars using FX swaps an…
Dollar Liquidity, Financial Vulnerability and Monetary Sovereignty
Periods of dollar-led global monetary tightening generate negative effects in many lower- and middle-income countries. The tightening cycle which commenced in early 2022 has exacerbated the financial dislocation experienced by countries including Zambia, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. How can policy makers protect their economies from such external shocks and foster a stable developmental environment? Some recent contributions argue that the capacity of…
“The art of imposing measurement upon the mind”
Sir Francis Galton singlehandedly instigated the navigational settings for the discipline of psychometrics by presupposing that mental attributes are measurable. In turn, this presupposition became the defining pillar of the psychometric paradigm. There were no scientifically sound reasons for adopting this presupposition and those Galton gave beg the question every time. So, what drove him to endorse this presupposition? Two considerations steer…
Denying Descartes and wary of Wittgenstein
In his article, “‘Are Psychological Attributes Quantitative?’ is not an Empirical Question: Conceptual Confusions in the Measurement Debate,” Franz (2022) concludes that psychological measurement does not rest on empirical hypotheses but rather on linguistic deceptions. His major premise is that psychometrics is inherently Cartesian. History shows otherwise: the mantras of operationism and the rituals of construct validity were intended to exorci…
Representational measurement theory
Representational measurement theory was proposed initially to solve problems caused by disciplinary aspirations of 19th-century mathematicians, who wanted to construe their subject as independent of its applications in empirical science. Half a century later, S. S. Stevens seized the opportunity provided by representational theory’s reconstruction of measurement as numerical coding to rubber-stamp psychology’s own aspirations to be counted as a q…
The Wall Street Consensus in pandemic times
The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the dominance of what Daniela Gabor calls the Wall Street Consensus (WSC) as the hegemonic approach to sustainable development. Public commitments to ‘green recoveries’ and climate resilience, growing fiscal deficits in the Global South, and new central bank emergency liquidity measures have created more space for WSC policies. We examine the key WSC climate policy tools – climate infrastructure as an asset cl…
Thorndike’s Credo
Endorsing a priori the conviction that any science worthy of the name must measure the attributes it investigates, psychometricians adopted a metaphysical paradigm (without acknowledging it as such) to secure its claim that mental tests measure psychological attributes, a claim that was threatened by the inadequacy of test data to secure it. The fundamental axiom of this paradigm was Thorndike’s Credo (“All that exists, exists in some amount and …
Educational attainment and the Brexit vote
The Brexit vote is the most significant political event in recent British history. We present bivariate choropleth maps comparing the Leave vote share with age-adjusted secondary educational attainment. This provides an immediate visual representation of the spatial and bivariate correlations between these variables, as well as their geographical distribution. Only 12 of the 85 local authorities that voted Remain had lower than expected age-adjus…
Conjoint measurement underdone
Trendler’s (2019) critique of conjoint measurement fails because he neglects to distinguish standard sequences (human constructions) from series of equal magnitudes (features of quantitative structures). The latter, not the former, is presumed in conjoint measurement. Furthermore, in so far as some mental tests use humans as measuring instruments, the only questionable assumption involved is that the relevant psychological attributes are quantita…
The fashionable scientific fraud
In his review of Charles Spearman’s The Nature of ‘Intelligence’ (1923), R. G. Collingwood launched an attack upon psychometrics that was expanded in his Essay on Metaphysics (1940). Although underrated by friend and foe alike, Collingwood’s critique identified a number of defects in the thinking of psychometricians that subsequently became entrenched. However, his main complaint was that psychology generally (and, by implication, psychometrics) …
On substandard substantive theory and axing axioms of measurement
My response to Humphry begins with some reflections upon why it is that after more than a century, psychometrics still lacks plausible substantive theories underwriting its claims to measure mental attributes and I explore the possibility that it is more myth-based technology than science. Historically, psychometrics has lacked any interest in coming to grips scientifically with the logical commitments of the presumption, implicit in the theories…
Measurement Theory
The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 7
That monetary influences play a dominant role in determining both the volume and direction of production is a truth which is probably more familiar to the present generation than to any that have g
The Rasch paradox, conjoint measurement, and psychometrics
This response to Humphry (2013) and Sijtsma (2012) is confined to three issues: the nature of the Rasch paradox, the relevance of the theory of conjoint measurement to psychometrics, and the relationship between test items on the one hand and the character of the attributes they assess on the other. First, contrary to Sijtsma’s view, it is argued that the Rasch model does involve a genuine paradox. Second, typical of psychometricians generally, b…
Critical Observations on Financialization and the Financial Process
The term "financialization" is a recognition that finance has come to play a key role on the modern capitalist economy. But users of the term do not agree on its meaning and recognition of the growing scale of finance has not brought about an increased understanding of financial processes. The paper examines the reasons for increased turnover in financial markets. The main themes in the literature on financialization are examined and shown to lac…
“The constantly recurring argument”
The inference from order to quantity is fundamental to psychometrics because the sorts of attributes that psychometricians aspire to measure are experienced directly only as ordered and, yet, it is concluded that such attributes are measurable on interval scales (i.e., that they are quantitative). This inference has been a feature of psychometrics since early last century, before which it permeated scientific thought and played a role in the deve…
Qualitative research meets the ghost of Pythagoras
The issue of qualitative versus quantitative methods is rooted first and foremost in the character of the phenomena investigated and not in an investigator’s methodological preferences. If the phenomenon under investigation is non-quantitative, then it cannot be studied successfully by attempting to use quantitative methods because trying to impose quantitative concepts upon qualitative phenomena misrepresents them. If the target articles provide…
Eurozone crisis
The sovereign debt crisis that broke out in Greece at the end of 2009 is fundamentally due to the precarious integration of peripheral countries in the eurozone. Its immediate causes, however, lie with the crisis of 2007–2009. Speculative mortgage lending by US financial institutions and trading of resultant derivative securities by international banks created a vast bubble in 2001–2007, leading to crisis and recession. State provision of liquidi…
Conjoint Measurement and the Rasch Paradox
Unlike Andrew Kyngdon, I think the issue he has addressed is most informatively considered outside the confines of the representational theory of measurement. Then it becomes clear that while the theory of conjoint measurement is about situations like that treated by the Rasch model, the former isolates a different feature of those situations to the latter. But, if the relevant attributes are already presumed to be quantitative, the perceived dif…
Psychophysics, intensive magnitudes, and the psychometricians’ fallacy
The Meaning of the Quantitative Imperative
In situating the quantitative imperative opposite the ‘imperative of presuppositions’ in a number of cases taken from the history of science, Niaz (2005) has moved from my understanding of the quantitative imperative (Michell, 2003) to one of his own construction. This might cause confusion if the different understandings of this term are not clearly distinguished. Given that imperatives are always only a mask for undisclosed interests and that, …
Quantitative science and the definition of measurement in psychology
It is argued that establishing quantitative science involves two research tasks: the scientific one of showing that the relevant attribute is quantitative; and the instrumental one of constructing procedures for numerically estimating magnitudes. In proposing quantitative theories and claiming to measure the attributes involved, psychologists are logically committed to both tasks. However, they have adopted their own, special, definition of measu…
The Wall Street Consensus in pandemic times
The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the dominance of what Daniela Gabor calls the Wall Street Consensus (WSC) as the hegemonic approach to sustainable development. Public commitments to ‘green recoveries’ and climate resilience, growing fiscal deficits in the Global South, and new central bank emergency liquidity measures have created more space for WSC policies. We examine the key WSC climate policy tools – climate infrastructure as an asset cl…
The place of qualitative research in psychology
The application of qualitative methods in psychological research is often located within the context of nontraditional philosophical frameworks rather than traditional, realist approaches to science. In so far as traditional philosophical approaches have been understood within psychology as favouring quantitative methods, this strategy has proved useful. However, in so far as those promoting qualitative methods would like to see instruction in th…
Measurement scales and statistics
Reflexions sur la persistance actuelle de la controverse suscitee par Stevens (1946) entre les echelles de mesure et les statistiques, a partir de l'identification de trois theories portant sur cette relation
Critical Observations on Financialization and the Financial Process
The term "financialization" is a recognition that finance has come to play a key role on the modern capitalist economy. But users of the term do not agree on its meaning and recognition of the growing scale of finance has not brought about an increased understanding of financial processes. The paper examines the reasons for increased turnover in financial markets. The main themes in the literature on financialization are examined and shown to lac…
Numbers as Quantitative Relations and the Traditional Theory of Measurement
The thesis that numbers are ratios of quantities has recently been advanced by a number of philosophers. While adequate as a definition of the natural numbers, it is not clear that this view suffices for our understanding of the reals. These require continuous quantity and relative to any such quantity an infinite number of additive relations exist. Hence, for any two magnitudes of a continuous quantity there exists no unique ratio. This problem …
The origins of the representational theory of measurement
Institutional supercycles
We build upon the Minskyan concepts of ‘thwarting mechanisms’ and ‘supercycles’ to develop a framework for analysing the dynamic evolutionary interactions between macrofinancial, institutional and political processes. Thwarting mechanisms are institutional structures that aim to stabilise the macrofinancial system. The effectiveness of these structures changes over time as a result of profit-seeking innovations and long-run destabilising processe…
Psychophysics, intensive magnitudes, and the psychometricians’ fallacy
Epistemology of Measurement
Five episodes in the history of quantitative science provided the occasions for changes in the understanding of measurement important for attempts at quantification in the social sciences. First, Euclid's generalization of the ancient concept of measure to the concept of ratio provided a clear rationale for the use of numbers in quantitative science, a rationale that has been important through the history of science and one that contradicts the d…
Teaching and misteaching measurement in psychology
“Do not block the way to enquiry.”—Charles Sanders PierceA feature common to all scientific methods is critical enquiry, that is, testing claims. If the teaching of methods in any scientific discipline fails to exemplify this common feature, then the enterprise of science may be subverted. This could happen, for example, if a hypothesis fundamental to some method were not taught critically or, more seriously, if critical scrutiny of it were to be…
To psychometrics, from thermometry
Since the 19th century, psychometrics has found false hope in reconstructions of thermometry’s history, as if the former’s failure to investigate whether psychological attributes are quantitative finds justification in the way understandings of temperature unfolded. Since David Sherry’s contribution, a number of psychologists have revived this old chestnut, so there may be merit in discussing the issues raised. First, that of temperature’s quanti…
Dollar Liquidity, Financial Vulnerability and Monetary Sovereignty
Periods of dollar-led global monetary tightening generate negative effects in many lower- and middle-income countries. The tightening cycle which commenced in early 2022 has exacerbated the financial dislocation experienced by countries including Zambia, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. How can policy makers protect their economies from such external shocks and foster a stable developmental environment? Some recent contributions argue that the capacity of…
Educational attainment and the Brexit vote
The Brexit vote is the most significant political event in recent British history. We present bivariate choropleth maps comparing the Leave vote share with age-adjusted secondary educational attainment. This provides an immediate visual representation of the spatial and bivariate correlations between these variables, as well as their geographical distribution. Only 12 of the 85 local authorities that voted Remain had lower than expected age-adjus…
The fashionable scientific fraud
In his review of Charles Spearman’s The Nature of ‘Intelligence’ (1923), R. G. Collingwood launched an attack upon psychometrics that was expanded in his Essay on Metaphysics (1940). Although underrated by friend and foe alike, Collingwood’s critique identified a number of defects in the thinking of psychometricians that subsequently became entrenched. However, his main complaint was that psychology generally (and, by implication, psychometrics) …
Bertrand Russell's 1897 Critique of the Traditional Theory of Measurement
Reply to Kline, Laming, Lovie, Luce and Morgan
My paper proposed first, that psychology is committed to the scientific task of testing the hypothesis that its supposedly measurable attributes really are quantitative; second, that from its inception, modern quantitative psychology has, with few exceptions, ignored this task, concentrating instead upon the instrumental task of quantification; and third, that modern psychology has adopted an intellectually pathological defence mechanism against …
Some Elementary Distributions of Stress in Three Dimensions
A force is applied to an isotropic elastic solid, either at an internal point, or on a plane boundary, or at the vertex of a cone, and it is required to find the distribution of stress.If we make the assumption that the stresses vary inversely as the square of the distance from the point of application of the force, we arrive at a series of elementary solutions of which those suitable for the present problems are here communicated.These elementar…
Measurement scales and statistics
Reflexions sur la persistance actuelle de la controverse suscitee par Stevens (1946) entre les echelles de mesure et les statistiques, a partir de l'identification de trois theories portant sur cette relation
The origins of the representational theory of measurement
Numbers as Quantitative Relations and the Traditional Theory of Measurement
The thesis that numbers are ratios of quantities has recently been advanced by a number of philosophers. While adequate as a definition of the natural numbers, it is not clear that this view suffices for our understanding of the reals. These require continuous quantity and relative to any such quantity an infinite number of additive relations exist. Hence, for any two magnitudes of a continuous quantity there exists no unique ratio. This problem …
Bertrand Russell's 1897 Critique of the Traditional Theory of Measurement
Reply to Kline, Laming, Lovie, Luce and Morgan
My paper proposed first, that psychology is committed to the scientific task of testing the hypothesis that its supposedly measurable attributes really are quantitative; second, that from its inception, modern quantitative psychology has, with few exceptions, ignored this task, concentrating instead upon the instrumental task of quantification; and third, that modern psychology has adopted an intellectually pathological defence mechanism against …
Quantitative science and the definition of measurement in psychology
It is argued that establishing quantitative science involves two research tasks: the scientific one of showing that the relevant attribute is quantitative; and the instrumental one of constructing procedures for numerically estimating magnitudes. In proposing quantitative theories and claiming to measure the attributes involved, psychologists are logically committed to both tasks. However, they have adopted their own, special, definition of measu…
Measurement in Psychology
This book traces how such a seemingly immutable idea as measurement proved so malleable when it collided with the subject matter of psychology. It locates philosophical and social influences (such as scientism, practicalism and Pythagoreanism) reshaping the concept and, at the core of this reshaping, identifies a fundamental problem: the issue of whether psychological attributes really are quantitative. It argues that the idea of measurement now …
Measuring the mind
Measuring the mind
Normal Science, Pathological Science and Psychometrics
A pathology of science is defined as a two-level breakdown in processes of critical inquiry: first, a hypothesis is accepted without serious attempts being made to test it; and, second, this first-level failure is ignored. Implications of this concept of pathology of science for the Kuhnian concept of normal science are explored. It is then shown that the hypothesis upon which psychometrics stands, the hypothesis that some psychological attribute…
Teaching and misteaching measurement in psychology
“Do not block the way to enquiry.”—Charles Sanders PierceA feature common to all scientific methods is critical enquiry, that is, testing claims. If the teaching of methods in any scientific discipline fails to exemplify this common feature, then the enterprise of science may be subverted. This could happen, for example, if a hypothesis fundamental to some method were not taught critically or, more seriously, if critical scrutiny of it were to be…
The Quantitative Imperative
The quantitative imperative is the view that in science, when you cannot measure, you do not really know what you are talking about, but when you can, you do, and, therefore, qualitative methods have no place in psychology. On the basis of this imperative, qualitative research methods are still excluded from mainstream psychology. Where does this view come from? Many qualitative researchers think it is an expression of positivism. Is this attribu…
Pragmatism, Positivism and the Quantitative Imperative
In this response I enlarge upon three comments by Hoshmand (2003) and Martin (2003). I endorse the recommendation for a pragmatist approach to evaluating research practice, but argue that such an approach alone will not resolve disagreements, for these generally have their origins in other matters. I agree that positivism had a profound influence upon psychology's methodological consensus and explain why it was powerless to resist the imposition …
Epistemology of Measurement
Five episodes in the history of quantitative science provided the occasions for changes in the understanding of measurement important for attempts at quantification in the social sciences. First, Euclid's generalization of the ancient concept of measure to the concept of ratio provided a clear rationale for the use of numbers in quantitative science, a rationale that has been important through the history of science and one that contradicts the d…
Item Response Models, Pathological Science and the Shape of Error
There is nothing in Borsboom and Mellenbergh’s (2004) response that refutes my thesis that psychometrics is a pathology of science. They seek to defend item response models from my charge of pathological science without apparently realizing that my charge relates to psychometricians, not to models. They appeal to the Quine-Duhem thesis in an attempt to argue that item response models do not allow the hypothesis that psychological attributes are q…
The place of qualitative research in psychology
The application of qualitative methods in psychological research is often located within the context of nontraditional philosophical frameworks rather than traditional, realist approaches to science. In so far as traditional philosophical approaches have been understood within psychology as favouring quantitative methods, this strategy has proved useful. However, in so far as those promoting qualitative methods would like to see instruction in th…
The Meaning of the Quantitative Imperative
In situating the quantitative imperative opposite the ‘imperative of presuppositions’ in a number of cases taken from the history of science, Niaz (2005) has moved from my understanding of the quantitative imperative (Michell, 2003) to one of his own construction. This might cause confusion if the different understandings of this term are not clearly distinguished. Given that imperatives are always only a mask for undisclosed interests and that, …
Psychophysics, intensive magnitudes, and the psychometricians’ fallacy
Conjoint Measurement and the Rasch Paradox
Unlike Andrew Kyngdon, I think the issue he has addressed is most informatively considered outside the confines of the representational theory of measurement. Then it becomes clear that while the theory of conjoint measurement is about situations like that treated by the Rasch model, the former isolates a different feature of those situations to the latter. But, if the relevant attributes are already presumed to be quantitative, the perceived dif…
Eurozone crisis
The sovereign debt crisis that broke out in Greece at the end of 2009 is fundamentally due to the precarious integration of peripheral countries in the eurozone. Its immediate causes, however, lie with the crisis of 2007–2009. Speculative mortgage lending by US financial institutions and trading of resultant derivative securities by international banks created a vast bubble in 2001–2007, leading to crisis and recession. State provision of liquidi…
Qualitative research meets the ghost of Pythagoras
The issue of qualitative versus quantitative methods is rooted first and foremost in the character of the phenomena investigated and not in an investigator’s methodological preferences. If the phenomenon under investigation is non-quantitative, then it cannot be studied successfully by attempting to use quantitative methods because trying to impose quantitative concepts upon qualitative phenomena misrepresents them. If the target articles provide…
“The constantly recurring argument”
The inference from order to quantity is fundamental to psychometrics because the sorts of attributes that psychometricians aspire to measure are experienced directly only as ordered and, yet, it is concluded that such attributes are measurable on interval scales (i.e., that they are quantitative). This inference has been a feature of psychometrics since early last century, before which it permeated scientific thought and played a role in the deve…
Critical Observations on Financialization and the Financial Process
The term "financialization" is a recognition that finance has come to play a key role on the modern capitalist economy. But users of the term do not agree on its meaning and recognition of the growing scale of finance has not brought about an increased understanding of financial processes. The paper examines the reasons for increased turnover in financial markets. The main themes in the literature on financialization are examined and shown to lac…
The Rasch paradox, conjoint measurement, and psychometrics
This response to Humphry (2013) and Sijtsma (2012) is confined to three issues: the nature of the Rasch paradox, the relevance of the theory of conjoint measurement to psychometrics, and the relationship between test items on the one hand and the character of the attributes they assess on the other. First, contrary to Sijtsma’s view, it is argued that the Rasch model does involve a genuine paradox. Second, typical of psychometricians generally, b…
Epistemology (26 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology (22 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (19 works) · Mathematics (17 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Psychometrics (11 works) · Economics (9 works)