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A test for discrete versus continuous?
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From: illywhacker <illywac...@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: sci.stat.math
Subject: Re: A test for discrete versus continuous?
Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 06:47:21 -0700 (PDT)
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On Jul 2, 11:46=A0am, Gary <LanceG...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a somewhat poorly formed question but the problem it
> represents has troubled me several times in my career. Essentially
> many theories may state that a particular phenomenon exists either as
> a dimension or as a set of discrete categories. For example Reversal
> Theory in psychology states (amongst other things) that a person is
> either in a telic (purpose driven, arousal avoiding, future oriented)
> mode or in a paratelic (activity driven, arousal seeking, present
> oriented) mode and that people can't be somewhere "inbetween" the two
> modes. So Reversal theory is positing a set of two discrete categories
> and strongly claims that all people are in one or other of the two
> states and that there is no continuum between them. Similarly Fulda
> developed a mathematical model of the pull of temptation and asserts
> that the model works on discrete moments of thought (in other words
> the probabilities of temptation that are being modelled are discrete
> and not continuous). In my experience it is really hard to devise
> tests for claims of this kind. I wondered whther there are any
> existing statistical tests designed to to test hypotheses of this
> kind, or whether there are procedures and designs suitable for testing
> such claims?
Hi Lance,
These claims seem meaningless as scientific statements, unless there
is some way to relate the state someone is in to something measurable.
Obviously if you could measure the state directly, then in the two-
state case you would only ever see two outcomes, which seems pretty
clear cut. So I presume the state is inferred from some other form of
measurement. What would that be?
illywhacker;
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