---
title: "Truman Lee Kelley"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Truman Lee Kelley"
aliases: ["T. L. Kelley"]
first_seen: "2026-08-11T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["jangle fallacy","jingle fallacy","psychometrics","Edward L. Thorndike","construct validity"]
seek_code_commit: "a619c8a"
---


American psychologist and psychometrician who, in his 1927 book *Interpretation of Educational Measurements*, named the **jangle fallacy** — treating two differently-named tests or constructs as measuring different things when they in fact measure the same one, the mirror image of the jingle fallacy Edward L. Thorndike had named in 1904. He matters to this vault as the older, foundational half of the jingle/jangle pairing that names the vault's most-used diagnostic for a recurring embedding-retrieval failure: two claim-notes cosine-paired on shared vocabulary that turn out to gate different mechanisms.

Kelley has been named in [[entity-jingle-fallacy]]'s own body since that hub's creation (`first_seen` 2026-08-11) but had no page of his own until flagged by name in a 2026-09-07 capture as the taxonomy's under-flagged ancestor — the vault had built a page for Thorndike ([[entity-edward-thorndike]]), the jingle-side originator, but not for Kelley, the jangle-side one.

Sourced here to the same attribution [[entity-jingle-fallacy]] itself rests on: Elson et al., "Detecting jingle and jangle fallacies by identifying consistencies and variabilities in study specifications" (PMC11393684), which credits the jangle fallacy to Kelley (1927, p. 64). Kelley's own book has not been directly read by the vault; no further biographical detail (dates, institution, other work) is recorded here because none has been sourced yet — this page starts minimal rather than inferring.

## References
- [[entity-jingle-fallacy]] — the hub tracking the vault's embedding false-friend taxonomy his 1927 coinage half-names
- Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-07-what-genuinely-connects-the-puckette-fourth-instance-hedged.md — the capture that flagged the missing page