1. 1. The writers present the general theory of evaluation that is being developed by their group.
2. 2. The evaluation of a human environment is a complex mental process.
3. 3. In an effort to express numerically the quality of an environment, one tends to oversimplify the complex aspects of it and the entailing problems in relation to its inhabitants.
4. 4. In this paper, some examples are taken in the evaluation of thermal environments, wherein much has been said and done in setting up numerical scales to express human comfort, and yet neither clear-cut explanations nor convincing logic seem to exist to terminate the argument over the widely scattered and sometimes seemingly contradicting experimental data.
5. 5. The writers suggest that many of the reasons for this confusion may be traced back to the oversimplified notion of evaluation.
6. 6. It is shown that there are various possibilities when looking at the scales of evaluation.
7. 7.|The nominal scale, least studied of all the four traditional scales, may be given a prominent place in evaluating a thermal environment. The pseudo-interval order scale is another example.
Author Keywords: evaluation; scales; thermal environment; classification; pseudo-interval order
