Название: Measurement Across the Sciences: Developing a Shared Concept System for Measurement 2nd Edition
Автор: Luca Mari, Mark Wilson, Andrew Maul
Издательство: Springer
Год: 2023
Страниц: 339
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub
Размер: 18.7 MB

This book proposes a conceptual framework for understanding measurement across a broad range of scientific fields and areas of application, such as physics, engineering, education, and psychology. It addresses contemporary issues and controversies within measurement in light of the framework, including operationalism, definitional uncertainty, and the relations between measurement and computation, and describes how the framework, operating as a shared concept system, supports understanding measurement’s work in different domains, using examples in the physical and human sciences.

This revised and expanded second edition features a new analysis of the analogies and the differences between the error/uncertainty-related approach adopted in physical measurement and the validity-related approach adopted in psychosocial measurement. In addition, it provides a better analysis and presentation of measurement scales, in particular about their relations with quantity units, and introduces the measurand identification/definition as a part of the "Hexagon Framework" along with new examples from the physical and psychosocial sciences. Researchers and academics across a wide range of disciplines including biological, physical, social, and behavioral scientists, as well as specialists in measurement and philosophy appreciate the work’s fresh and provocative approach to the field at a time when sound measurements of complex scientific systems are increasingly essential to solving critical global problems.

Characterizations of measurement found in different fields and different historical periods relate in important ways to more general issues in science, philosophy, and society, such as the nature of properties and the objects that bear them, the relationship between experimentation and modeling, and the relationships between data, information, and knowledge—and indeed, the very possibility of (true) knowledge. In particular, on this last point, a question of increasing relevance to our data-saturated world is: given the increasing trends of interest in “Big Data” and “datafication”, under what conditions does data actually provide information on the measurand? In the radically new context of widespread availability of large, sometimes huge, amounts of data in which we are now living, it is plausible that measurement science will maintain a role in our society only by attaining a broadly shared fundamental basis, instead of dissolving in a myriad of technical sub-disciplines.

Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Fundamental Concepts in Measurement
3. Technical and Cultural Contexts for Measurement Systems
4. Philosophical Perspectives on Measurement
5. What is Measured?
6. Values, Scales, and the Existence of Properties
7. Modeling Measurement and Its Quality
8. Conclusion