The Analytic Cart Before the Ontological Horse: A Response to Michell’s “The Mystery of Missing Psychometric Corpus ”

This response to Michell’s article raises three main concerns. First, there is an important yet unexamined relationship between psychology’s reliance on inferential statistics (NHST) and the “missing corpus” of critiques of psychometricians’ a priori assumption that psychological attributes sustain quantitative structure. Second, framing the problem as one of “visible” (NHST) versus “invisible” (measurement) critiques may mask how commitment to NHST drove psychologists to assume measurement is taking place. Finally, Michell fails to account for the role political theory played in explaining the widespread adoption of psychometric methods, sans scientific evidence.