A George H. Mead source page

Originally published as:

George Herbert Mead. "The Problem of Psychological Measurement", Proceedings of the American Psychological Association, New York: MacMillan & Co. (1894): 22-23.

Editors' notes

During his graduate studies in Leipzig and Berlin, Mead began work on his "Opera omnia," an analysis of space perception. In a letter to his close friend Henry Castle he wrote

"I have acquired a respect for the work done and the men who have done it on the subject which is far beyond what I had 3 months ago. A steady clearing up of the physical processes, and unflinching determinism to express the facts of sensation with perfect simplicity are features that call for enthusiasm when one finds them freed from all bitterness of polemicism and always kept fresh by constant contact with Mother Nature. Such men as Hering, Helmholst, Stumpf, one must doff his hat to. The latter [has] real speculative depth." [1]

We believe that this early piece on measurement was part of that work.

Because of his role as godfather to Blumer's Symbolic Interactionist tradition, people rarely speak of Mead and measurement in the same breath. We believe this to be a mistake. The reservations held by some humanists on the legitimacy of measurement are often used to draw a distinction between Meadian and other approaches to social psychology. At the core of Mead's approach is a concern for making measurement meaningful in the analysis of human behavior.

This brief document touches on an inherent problem with the "just noticeable difference" approach to organizing observations within psychophysics, the primary focus of the emerging psychological laboratories across North America and Europe (See Time Line of Psychology). It is the first of four small pieces containing Mead's critique of measurement within 19th century psychophysics, and should be read with his two essays discussing Lasswitz's work on epistemology and his critique of Simmel's Psychology of Wealth. The critique focuses on measurement as a process, its relationship to it's product, the measure itself, the contradictions in their use in contemporary psychophysics, and its implications for measurement with psychology.

David L. Miller (1972: ) has contended that these articles are the precursor to the arguments presented by Dewey in "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology." This has to do with Mead's notions about linearization of the act, presented in his discussion of Lasswitz. In as much as the reflex arc article is part of a four-articles series by Dewey -- a series which includes the theory of emotion developed with Mead -- there may be some merit in Miller's interpretation.

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The Problem of Psychological Measurement

Measurement is the breaking up of a quantum of energy into equal units. In undeveloped consciousness we have an original plenum without parts. These are introduced by those processes, generally rhythmical and bilateral, by which the important contacts of touch are mediated through the eye and ear, and which on the biological side are the expression of the means of carrying out the general life-process -- involving the attaining of food, the avoiding of danger and the process of reproduction.

Measurement becomes possible when these rhythmical bilateral processes can be brought into consciousness in tension -- e.g., in estimating a distance. The number of the rhythmical processes required to attain the object constitutes its temporal character, the sum of them its spacial character, the one being expressed in terms of the other. The finer exact measurements of the mathematical sciences are functions of the coarser measurements which the eye can directly effect. The postulate of such finer measurements is a continuum capable of infinite extension and infinite division. The psychological expression of such a continuum is the mediating activity abstracted from the stimulus.

Coming back to the problem of psycho-physical measurement, the quantum measured is, as in the personal equation of the astronomer, a personal error. The least perceptible difference in weight is evidently that limit within which our judgment is unable to detect a difference, and if we depended upon these judgments for our estimate of relative weights it would be an error that the physicist would have to consider. To determine whether this element -- the personal error -- is a psychical one or a physical one we must determine where the line is drawn between the physical and psychical in consciousness. The most important division that we find is between the world as composed of means and of ends. Our objects are teleological, i.e., means to possible ends.

(23) Biologically these means are sensations that act as stimuli to bring us to certain important tactile contacts or to enable us to avoid deleterious ones. This, as has been shown, is the province of measurement. By rhythmical, generally bilateral movements, we break up the continua into equalizable units. We find now that with this process of gaining tactile contacts corresponds the objective spacial world -- a world of teleological objects; that to the world of thought -- the so-called psychical world -- correspond the ends or purposes in consciousness. Measurement can belong, therefore, only to that which is objective and spacial, and the psycho-physical quanta must stand for the physiological elements of our reactions, expressed in personal equations.

Notes

No notes

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