Success Without Measure: Historical Authority and Epistemic Overreach

Abstract

Text-analytic methods increasingly promise to transform surviving textual traces into measurements of past psychological attributes. This paper argues that such claims can mistake technical success for representational warrant. A scoring regime may perform well within a constructed evidential space without thereby validating the construct-to-trace relation required for measurement. The central problem is endogenous validation: the same operations that make texts scoreable also delimit the evidence by which success is assessed. Strong measurement claims therefore require credible conditions under which the underlying representational mapping could fail.