ABSTRACT
What is now considered classical measurement theory—which has nothing to do with the theory of making measurements—is concerned with specifying the homomorphisms of some “qualitative (or empirical) structure into a numerical one” (Narens 1985, p. 5). This view of classical measurement theory is referred to as the representational theory, because we are concerned with how to characterize the ways in which a given empirical structure can be represented in a numerical structure. This approach received a nearly definitive embodiment in Krantz, Luce, Suppes, and Tversky (1971). Narens (1984) provided further elegant mathematical elaborations and developments. However, one form of measurement has been conspicuously ignored in this modern view: the measurement of error. Narens’ book does not contain the word “error” in its index. Krantz et al. (1971) provided two entries in the index. One concerns approximation and measurement by inequality relations and gives us no quantitative handle on error, and the other contains the following cryptic remark: “Today (1971), however, few error theories exist; what we know about them is described in Chapters 15–17” (Krantz et al., 1971).
