On the representation of error

Jeffrey Helzner

pp. 601-613

in: Horacio Arló-Costa, Gregory Wheeler (eds), Commemorating the work of Henry E. Kyburg Jr., Synthese 186 (2), 2012.

Abstract

Though he maintained a significant interest in theoretical aspects of measurement, Henry E. Kyburg, Jr. was critical of the representational theory that in many ways has come to dominate discussions concerning the foundations of measurement. In particular, Kyburg (in Savage and Ehrlich (eds) Philosophical and foundational issues in measurement theory, 1992) asserts that the representational theory of measurement, as introduced in (Scott and Suppes, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 23:113–128, 1958) and developed in (Krantz et al., Foundations of measurment: additive and polynomial representations. Academic Press, 1971), cannot account for the measurement of error. The present work examines and responds to this charge.