Psychologists tend to treat a test as having meaning when it has some form of ‘validity’, ‘validity’ being the catch-all name for the different ways a psychologist might assess if a test looks meaningful. For example, some Big Five personality scores correlate with things like job performance, suggesting predictive validity. Whether this kind of validation can prove that a test has meaning will hinge on what you feel it means for a test to have meaning.
Whether this kind of validation can prove that a test has meaning will hinge on what you feel it means for a test to have meaning.
In that case we should probably taboo “meaning” (in this context) and talk directly about whatever it is we want a test to do — make clinically useful predictions, carve reality along its natural joints, etc.
Psychologists tend to treat a test as having meaning when it has some form of ‘validity’, ‘validity’ being the catch-all name for the different ways a psychologist might assess if a test looks meaningful. For example, some Big Five personality scores correlate with things like job performance, suggesting predictive validity. Whether this kind of validation can prove that a test has meaning will hinge on what you feel it means for a test to have meaning.
In that case we should probably taboo “meaning” (in this context) and talk directly about whatever it is we want a test to do — make clinically useful predictions, carve reality along its natural joints, etc.