Measurement and Meaning

Measurement and Meaning takes stock of the most important projects in the conceptual grounding of measurement, from early representational theories through the axiomatic approach to operationalism. Ferenc Csatári thoroughly analyzes the relevant philosophical issues and identifies the controversial points in these accounts. Meanwhile, he pays special attention to the peculiarities of measurement in the social sciences. As long as measurement is conceived as an assignment of numerical structures to represent properties—as traditionally done—one might feel obliged to account for continuum, errors, and truth. Csatári puts these key concepts under scrutiny and arrives at a non-trivial, constructive interpretation for each. On these new conceptual grounds, the active quest for congruence in phenomena will be the key to establishing meaningful measurement procedures.