Guttman, Louis (Eliyahu)

‘Mathematics is contentless, and hence – by itself –
not empirical science’: this encapsulates, in his own
words, Guttman’s creed. In one of the paradoxes
so prevalent in the social sciences, his striving
to reveal the fundamental structures of social and
psychological phenomena, their ‘content’, has tended
to be eclipsed by his many contributions to statistical
methodology, the ‘mathematics’ that Guttman always
saw as a servant to the discovery of general laws,
never an end in its own right. The approach to
research that he called Facet Theory, which he spent
his life developing, is a set of fundamental postulates
that describes the interplay between the substantive
ways of describing phenomena and the empirical
observations of properties of their structures. He
showed how this approach generates universally
sound predictions, which he called ‘laws’. These are
characterized by his ‘First Law of Attitude’: