Chapter 6: Invalidity in Validity

The concept of test validity was proposed in 1921. It helped allay doubts about whether tests really measure anything. To say that the issue of a test’s validity is that of whether it measures what it is supposed to measure already presumes, first, that the test measures something and, second, that whatever it is supposed to assess can be measured. An attribute is measurable if and only if it possesses both ordinal and additive structure. Since there is no hard evidence that the attributes that testers aspire to measure are additively structured, the presumptions underlying the concept of validity are invalidly endorsed. As directly experienced, these attributes are ordinal and non-quantitative. The invalidity in validity is that of feigning knowledge where ignorance obtains.