1st Edition

Reasoning in Measurement

Edited By Nicola Mößner, Alfred Nordmann Copyright 2017
    274 Pages
    by Routledge

    274 Pages
    by Routledge

    This collection offers a new understanding of the epistemology of measurement. The interdisciplinary volume explores how measurements are produced, for example, in astronomy and seismology, in studies of human sexuality and ecology, in brain imaging and intelligence testing. It considers photography as a measurement technology and Henry David Thoreau's poetic measures as closing the gap between mind and world.

    By focusing on measurements as the hard-won results of conceptual as well as technical operations, the authors of the book no longer presuppose that measurement is always and exclusively a means of representing some feature of a target object or entity. Measurement also provides knowledge about the degree to which things have been standardized or harmonized – it is an indicator of how closely human practices are attuned to each other and the world.

    1 Epistemological Dimensions of Measurement

    Nicola Mößner and Alfred Nordmann

    PART I

    Founding Figures

    2 Of Compass, Chain, and Sounding Line: Taking Thoreau’s Measure

    Laura Dassow Walls

    3 Operationalism: Old Lessons and New Challenges

    Hasok Chang

    PART II

    Images as Measurements

    4 Photo Mensura

    Patrick Maynard

    5 The Media Aesthetics of Brain Imaging in Popular Science

    Liv Hausken

    6 Compressed Sensing – A New Mode of Measurement

    Thomas Vogt

    7 The Altered Image: Composite Figures and Evidential Reasoning with Mechanically Produced Images

    Laura Perini

    8 Visual Data – Reasons to be Relied on?

    Nicola Mößner

    9 Pictorial Evidence: On the Rightness of Pictures

    Tobias Schöttler

    PART III

    Measuring the Immeasurable

    10 Measurement in Medicine and Beyond: Quality of Life, Blood Pressure and Time

    Leah McClimans

    11 Measuring Intelligence Effectively: Psychometrics from a Philosophy of Technology Perspective

    Andreas Kaminski

    12 The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid and the Measurement of Human Sexuality

    Donna J. Drucker

    13 The Desert and the Dendrograph: Place, Community and Ecological Instrumentation

    Emily K. Brock

     

    PART IV

    Calibrating Mind and World

    14 Scientific Measurement as Cognitive Integration: The Role of Cognitive Integration in the Growth of Scientific Knowledge

    Godfrey Guillaumin

    15 Measurements in the Engineering Sciences: An Epistemology of Producing Knowledge of Physical Phenomena

    Mieke Boon

    16 Uncertainty and Modeling in Seismology

    Teru Miyake

    17 A Model-Based Epistemology of Measurement

    Eran Tal

    Index

    Biography

    Nicola Mößner, Junior Fellow at Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald in Germany. She received her M.A. in German Literature and Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Münster. Her thesis is about the epistemology of testimony and the special case of media reports, published as Wissen aus dem Zeugnis anderer – der Sonderfall medialer Berichterstattung (Paderborn: mentis 2010). Currently she works on a research project concerning the epistemic role of visualisations in science. In this context, she edited (together with Dimitri Liebsch) Visualisierung und Erkenntnis – Bildverstehen und Bildverwenden in Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften (Cologne: Herbert von Halem 2012). Her main interests comprise philosophy of science and social epistemology.

    Alfred Nordmann, professor of Philosophy at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and adjunct professor at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Nordmann’s interests in the philosophy of science concern the formation and contestation of fields of inquiry such as chemistry and theories of electricity in the 18th century, mechanics, evolutionary biology, and sociology in the 19th century. In particular, he sought to articulate implicit concepts of science and objectivity. In 2000, he embarked on a similar endeavor in regard to nanoscience and converging technologies which has led him to promote and develop a comprehensive philosophy of technoscience. Since the technosciences require new answers to the familiar questions of knowledge and objectivity, theory and evidence, explanation and validation, representation and experimentation, Nordmann is seeking to address these and related questions in his current work.