In these introductory remarks to the May 1960 Princeton University Conference on Preference Analysis and Subject Measurement, Gulliksen notes that the meeting will deal with recent developments in subjective measurement. A comparison is drawn showing that the basic methods of subjective measurement initiated over a hundred years ago now have a large number of applications in the social sciences and in industry. Illustrations show that they have been made more generally useful by extension to multidimensional areas and by the development of adequate methods for analyzing individual differences in linear preference systems.