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Theory & Psychology
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The Meaning of the Quantitative Imperative

A Response to Niaz

Joel Michell

University of Sydney, joelm{at}psych.usyd.edu.au

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, as a consequence, it can be misleading to treat any historical instance of an imperative in abstraction from the interests driving it, two senses of the quantitative imperative can always be distinguished: a narrow sense, which is the imperative in abstraction; and a broad sense, which is the imperative masking a specific set of interests in a particular historical episode. In this latter sense, in the historical episode that I have investigated, the quantitative imperative is a political campaign protecting a scientistic image of psychology and packaging psychological tests as methods of scientific measurement.

Key Words: measurement • qualitative methods • quantitative imperative • realism

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 15, No. 2, 257-263 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354305051369
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