ABSTRACT
THE widespread adoption by social scientists of the classical or metric form of multidimensional scaling (MMDS) procedures first developed by Young and Householder (1938) and Torgerson (1958) for the measurement of cognitive and cultural processes has been a gradual process. In general, MMDS procedures define
cognitive and cultural processes as changes in the relations among sets of cultural “objects” or concepts. The interrelationships among these objects are themselves measured by magnitude estimation pair comparisons, and the resulting dissimilarities matrices are entered into metric multidimensional scaling programs. The result of this work is that each of the cultural objects is represented as a point in a multidimensional Riemann space. Cognitive and cultural processes may be defined within this framework as motions of these objects relative to the other objects within the space. (Woelfel & Fink, 1980, x)
