An Analysis of Concept-Clusters in Semantic Inter-Concept Space
John Ε. Hofman · The American Journal of Psychology · 1967
The semantic differential is a technique for measuring the meaning of concepts by rating them, differentiating them, on a set of bipolar adjectival scales selected to represent an hypothetical multi-dimensional space.1 One of the features of the techniques is the allocation of the rated concepts to points in semantic space. The distances between points are held to be roughly proportional to whatever psychological affinity between them is mediated by meaning. Thus, when concepts from some domain, say, that of education, are differentiated, they will form configurations composed of meaningfully related conceptual clusters; for example, concepts relevant to one philosophy of education will be relatively closer to one another than they will be to concepts relevant to another philosophy. A cluster can be defined as a grouping of two or more elements more related to one another than they are to elements outside of the grouping.