Measurement and validity are causal concepts, not correlational ones

Evidence

The only thing that all measurement procedures have in common is the either implicit or explicit assumption that there is an attribute out there that, somewhere in the long and complicated chain of events leading up to the measurement outcome, is playing a causal role in determining what values the measurements will take…. The crucial mistake is the view that validity is about correlation. Validity concerns measurement, and measurement has a clear direction. The direction goes from the world to our instruments. It is very difficult not to construct this relation as causal…. Now, measurement is a causal concept, not a correlational one, and validity is so too. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 335

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Borsboom’s insistence that validity is a directional causal relation rather than a correlation cuts against the near-universal psychometric practice of validating instruments by correlation coefficients.
• XREF: Connects to formal measurement tradition (Stevens, Krantz–Luce–Suppes) and to Goertz’s own later contrast between indicator-of and causal-arrow relations. — connects to: Overlapping measures of NPI and affective polarization make testing their theorized causal link impossible. — Sabrina J. Mayer and Luana Russo, What one is not: a new scale to measure…, 11