Validation of psychological tests has not yet been adequately conceptualized, as the APA Committee on Psychological Tests learned when it undertook (1950-54) to specify what qualities should be investigated before a test is published. In order to make coherent recommendations the Committee found it necessary to distinguish four types of validity, established by different types of research and requiring different interpretation. The chief innovation in the Committee's report was the term construct validity.[2] This idea was first formulated by a subcommittee (Meehl and R. C. Challman) studying how proposed recommendations would apply to projective techniques, and later modified and clarified by the entire Committee (Bordin, Challman, Conrad, Humphreys, Super, and the present writers). The statements agreed upon by the Committee (and by committees of two other associations) were published in the Technical Recommendations (59). The present interpretation of construct validity is not "official" and deals with some areas where the Committee would probably not be unanimous. The present writers are solely responsible for this attempt to explain the concept and elaborate its implications.

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Construct validity in psychological tests.

https://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/87/6/477.pdf

A theory of cognitive development: The control and construction of hierarchies of skills.

In this far-ranging essay David Olson attempts to reframe current controversies over several aspects of language, including meaning, comprehension, acquisition, reading, and reasoning. Olson argues that in all these cases the conflicts are rooted in differing assumptions about the relation of meaning to language: whether meaning is extrinsic to language—a relation Olson designates as "utterance"—or intrinsic— a relation he calls "text." On both the individual and cultural levels there has been development, Olson suggests, from language as utterance to language as text. He traces the history and impact of conventionalized, explicit language from the invention of the Greek alphabet through the rise of the British essayist technique. Olson concludes with a discussion of the resulting conception of language and the implications for the linguistic, psychological, and logical issues raised initially.

From Utterance to Text: The Bias of Language in Speech and Writing

The object of this paper is to show why recent research in the psychology of deductive and probabilistic reasoning does not have "bleak implications for human rationality," as has sometimes been supposed. The presence of fallacies in reasoning is evaluated by referring to normative criteria which ultimately derive their own credentials from a systematisation of the intuitions that agree with them. These normative criteria cannot be taken, as some have suggested, to constitute a part of natural science, nor can they be established by metamathematical proof. Since a theory of competence has to predict the very same intuitions, it must ascribe rationality to ordinary people.Accordingly, psychological research on this topic falls into four categories. In the first, experimenters investigate conditions under which their subjects suffer from genuine cognitive illusions. The search for explanations of such performance errors may then generate hypotheses about the ways in which the relevant information-processing mechanisms operate. In the second category, experimenters investigate circumstances in which their subjects exhibit mathematical or scientific ignorance: these are tests of the subjects' intelligence or education. In the third and fourth categories, experimenters impute a fallacy where none exists, either because they are applying the relevant normative criteria in an inappropriate way or because the normative criteria being applied are not the appropriate ones.

Can human irrationality be experimentally demonstrated

The Handbook * Contains contributions by experts from various disciplines that reflect current trends and controversies on judgment and decision making. * Provides a glimpse at the many approaches that have been taken in the study of judgment and decision making and portrays the major findings in the field. * Presents examinations of the broader roles of social, emotional, and cultural influences on decision making. * Explores applications of judgment and decision making research to important problems in a variety of professional contexts, including finance, accounting, medicine, public policy, and the law.

Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making

The primary purpose of this book has not been to recount all that past scholars have said about the science, but rather to record the first appearances of those ideas which seem most important in the logic of our own day.

William Kneale

Papers

The development of logic

The Development of Logic

Probability and induction

Probability and Induction.

The Development of Logic.