Transcript the slides from this talk here!

Measurement: A medium for
communication and social action
Plenary address to the 2015 Symposium of the
Pacific Rim Objective Measurement Society
William P Fisher Jr PhD
University of California, Berkeley, California
Robert F Cavanagh PhD
Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia
Organisation
Introduction - an argument for metrosophy and a
phenomenological lens on measurement (Cavanagh)
First Characteristic of Phenomenology: “Back to the
Things Themselves” (Fisher)
Second Characteristic of Phenomenology: Authentic
Method (Fisher)
Third Characteristic of Phenomenology: Unity of
Subject and Object (Cavanagh)
Fourth Characteristic of Phenomenology: The World of
the Text (Fisher)
The Amodern Perspective (Fisher)
Conclusion: A Glimpse of Amodern Measurement
Theory (Cavanagh)
Why adopt a philosophical
orientation?
Science and scientific progress are inextricably linked
with the role of technology in history and societal
development
For example, the Strong Programme of the 1970s
sought to replace the philosophy of science with a
sociology of science
The resulting relativism led to a frustrating sense that
“anything goes”
Renewed efforts to either dig deeper into existing
philosophies or to move past the modern vs
postmodern, and positivist vs anti-positivist divides
In particular, positivist conceptions of science that
were developed centuries earlier in the Enlightenment
persist in ‘popularist’ notions of science, such as naïve
realism
“…there is a sharp divide between interpretavist and
neo-positivist ontological world views which cannot be
expected to be resolved in the near future” (Kampen &
Tobi, 2011, p. 1)
Implications of the divide for measurement
Instrumentalist or deterministic measurement models
are commonly associated with positivist ontologies
Probabilistic measurement models can be more
productively associated with anti-positivist or postpositivist ontologies or stochastic world-views
The ontologies informing human science, social
science and humanistic inquiry are related to the
respective theoretical bases for measurement in these
three fields
Shifts in philosophical orientation accompanying
movement between different forms of enquiry require
concomitant reframing of the existing theory of
measurement or possibly development of a new theory
Adoption of a philosophical perspective on
measurement theory has the potential to provide new
insights of theoretical significance to
measurement………
Why phenomenology?
The three major substantive concerns of the project measurement, meaningful communication, and societal
renewal
Proposing hermeneutical insight into the reading of
scientific measuring instruments (Heelan, 1983)
Emphasising meaning in communication, and the
“commonality of language ensuring a shared
acceptance of meaning and ability to vocalise
thoughts” (Regan, 2012, p. 288)
Recognition of lifeworld as a fundamental construct in
society, “an historically and culturally invariant
structure, without which human life and its various
modes of experience would be unimaginable”
(Schieman, 2014, p. 32).
Another reason for choosing phenomenology is its
basis in geometry as a root model of scientific conduct
(Husserl, 1954/1970; Gadamer, 1980, pp. 100-101).
Transcendental phenomenology is the categorisation
of lived experiences and mental activities in order to
develop an understanding of underlying order or
coherence (Husserl, 1913/1983)
A process analogous to the development of the
schema constituting the natural sciences, for example,
the taxonomies of Biology and Geology
For Crease, (2014, p. 81), metrosophy is “a shared
cultural understanding of why we measure and what
measuring delivers to us, an understanding that
evolves over time and across cultures”………..
First Characteristic of
Phenomenology: “Back to the
Things Themselves”
Not “things in themselves”
 Rather, the invariant conceptual profile of
things that remains constant across uses of
words and instances of a kind of thing
 Concepts, words and things: semiotic triangle
 Any productive science grasping things
themselves via theory, instruments, and data
does good phenomenology by definition

Second Characteristic of
Phenomenology: Authentic Method
Method: meta-odos, a following along after
the thing itself on the path it takes up
 Each different thing in the world exists as
what it is in characteristic ways
 Words and concepts represent things
relative to each other in linguistic systems
 Inauthentic method imposes words on things
 Authentic method allows things to suggest
appropriate word-concept pairings, poetically

Third Characteristic of
Phenomenology: Unity of Subject
and Object
The unity of subject and object characterising
phenomenology rejects separation between mind and
world, between language and reality, and between
subject and object
Plato - a metaphysical realist view of the natural world.
The need to transcend human knowledge and for our
minds to represent reality; a reality that exists
independently of our minds
While ‘desires’ and ‘reason’ existed in the Greek
culture, these were in harmony (Hegel,1910/2003)
Hegel also noted the harmony persisted until the
emergence of ‘individual conscience’ in protestant
Europe in the 18th century and the rise of the ‘new
science’
This new science was in tension with the “omniscience
of the metaphysical tradition”, there was an imbalance
between “a science of reason based on concepts and a
science based on experience” (Gadamer, 1970/2006, p.
16).
Kant’s solution
By getting straight the distinction between sensibility
and the understanding and by keeping straight the
sources of our concepts, we can protect the claims of
geometry from those of metaphysics. Geometry
applies to the objects of sensibility, objects given in
space and time, metaphysics applies to the objects of
the understanding, that is, God and moral perfection.
(Carson, 2011, p. 30)
Kant also contrasted metaphysical idealism with
realism
Metaphysical idealism is the view that the ultimate
nature of reality is constituted by minds or ideas.
Realism holds, on the contrary, that the nature of
reality is mind-independent” (Dudley and Engelhard,
2010, p. 3).
A related more general issue is the relation between
one’s experiences, and the world, that is, between
phenomena and reality
Dilworth (2007, p. 9), attested to the attention this has
been given:
At one time or another virtually every conceivable line
has been taken on the issue, from the view that there is
no reality other than phenomena [empiricism], to the
view that reality, while different from phenomena, alone
causes and is perfectly represented by them [realism].
Empiricism - “broadly speaking, the view that scientific
investigation be confined to phenomena and their
formal relations” (Dilworth, 2007, p. 9).

An extreme form of empiricism is the positivism
developed by Comte. He was insistent that
understanding nature and discovering its laws must
commence with, and be restricted to, the analysis of
phenomena

Ontological questions are neither asked nor
answered, instead the focus is epistemological
concerns, particularly how to develop theory from
observations
A central tenet of logical positivism/empiricism is the
theory/observation distinction. “It is only because
observations are independent of theories that they
could serve as evidential warrants to appraise the
adequacy of theories, to ground theory comparisons”
(Zammito, 2004, p. 10)
The more recent recognition that observations cannot
be completely independent of theory, the theory-laden
nature of observations (Shapere, 1984)
Another criticism of positivism is its inadequacy in
understanding human behaviour, particularly when
applied in the social sciences
Positivist social science is an impossible construction
for human inquiry. Not only does it belie a bureaucratic
market mentality (research is big business), but in its
legitimation of social structures and practices that
deny intersubjective meanings, it fails as a discourse
for personal agency, moral obligation and political
responsibility (Brieschke, 1992, p. 178)
Kuhn (1970) acknowledged that phenomena could not
be observed raw, but were always interpreted through
a framework of preconceptions and according to
assumptions bound up with the use of certain
instruments.
Kuhn (1970) recognised the limitations of the
assumption of universality underpinning positivism.
Kuhn noted that scientific methods and practices were
not universal, but localized within quite tightly bounded
communities of practitioners
These criticisms of modern positivism constitute some
of the arguments of postmodern anti-positivism that
led to a move beyond the positivist vs anti-positivist
deadlock to an unmodern post-positivism.
Heitdman, Wysienska and Szmatka, (2000, p. 17)
identified three principles of a post-positivist
perspective: “All scientific data are theoretically
informed”; “empirical commitments are not based
solely on experimental evidence”; and “fundamental
shifts of scientific belief occur only when empirical
changes are matched by the availability of alternative
theoretical commitments”
The principles posit that science does not proceed
through inductive processes or that a theory can ever
be conclusively validated by empirical means (see
Kuhn, 1970; Lakatos, 1970)
This is a unified orientation because in “rejecting the
epistemological distinction between observation
statements, grounded in experience, and theoretical
statements, based on conjecture, post-positivists
identified knowledge with theory” (McEvoy, 2007, p.
386)
What remains missing in this anti-positivist
perspective is the role of technologically-embodied
knowledge (Dewey, 2012; Galison, 1997; Heelan, 1983;
Ihde, 1991; Latour, 1990, 1993)
Technologies and instruments, from phonemes,
movable type, books, and thermometers must be
accounted for, since they embody the media through
which meanings are communicated and shared
What we are doing, then, is "...thinking out the
consequences of language as medium" (Gadamer,
1989, p. 461), moving past the modern and the
postmodern to an unmodern (Dewey, 2012) or amodern
(Latour, 1990, 1993) embodiment of understanding in
the fused horizons of unified subject-objects.
The consequences of language as medium, as
knowledge embodied in the technologies of
standardized alphabets, grammars, phonemes,
syntaxes, printing presses, books, web pages, and
digital fonts, stands in radical contrast with the “fatal
conceit” (Hayek, 1988) of the modern Cartesian
presumption of an independent subject making its own
way to worldly being

Continued reliance on modern and postmodern
conceptions advocating or criticizing subjectivities
over against objects prevents us from formulating
the concepts, methods, and tools needed for
paradigm shifting broad scale improvements in the
quality of psychological and social measurement
……
Fourth Characteristic of
Phenomenology: The World of the Text



In appropriating meaning, what is 'made our own' is
not something mental, not the author’s intention,
nor some design supposedly hidden behind the
text.
Rather, it is the projection of a world, the proposal
of a mode-of-being-in-the-world, which the text
discloses in front of itself.
Texts project worlds, and readers’ worlds are
broadened by the expansion of their horizons.
The Amodern Perspective
An alternative unmodern (Dewey, 2012) or
amodern (Latour, 1990, 1993) frame of
reference offers a fundamentally different
basis for thinking about and doing
measurement. This alternative focuses
 on knowledge as technology,
 on the lack of a central authority over the
use and development of language,
The Amodern Perspective



on its recognition of end users as having little or
no understanding of how language and
technology work,
on its acceptance of genuine method as a
playful captivation in the flow of mutually
implicated subjects and objects, and
on its focus on the wide distribution of
standardized tools as providing the language
unifying fields of research and practice.
Unity Through Disunity
Unity through Disunity
“It is the disorder of the scientific community—
the laminated, finite, partially independent strata
supporting one another; it is the disunification of
science—the intercalation of different patterns of
argument—that is responsible for its strength
and coherence” (Galison, 1997, pp. 843-844).
Translation Network
Analogies, Allies, Passage Points, & Boundary
Objects
Concept, model,
ideal, theory
Experiments,
evaluations
Instruments, tools,
words
Theoreticians Instrument Makers Experimentalists Legal Metrology
(also Accountants, Educators, Publishers, Economists, Regulators,
Standards groups, etc.)
(Adapted from Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 390)
A Glimpse of Amodern Measurement
Theory

Amodern measurement has developed in response
to philosophical and historical critique of traditional
and emergent approaches to measurement in the
natural and social sciences

From a phenomenological orientation, one purpose
of amodern measurement is to develop an invariant
understanding of distinct subjective experiences

The authenticity of the methods of amodern
measurement is supported by the development of
conceptual representations relevant to particular
groups or contexts and with proven capacity for
explaining causality

Instruments are calibrated, common units
developed, and reporting systems designed to
enable meaningful and consistent portability of
measures and uncertainties between different
groups and situations

The construction and refinement of amodern
measures is also an iterative endeavour similar to
the hermeneutic circle. As more information
becomes available from empirical and theoretical
sources, it is applied to improve understanding of
the phenomenon of interest and concurrently to
refine technical and substantive features of the
measure, and so on

The unity of subject and object, and the alternative
conceptualization of separating subject from object
only insofar as they are embodied together in a
shared technological medium, are of fundamental
consequence to amodern measurement and
instrument construction

The reach of amodern measurement in the social
sciences extends beyond quantifying specific
qualities of an individual to the development and
deployment of technical communications systems
representing interactions between individuals and
between individuals and their worlds

Amodern measurement coordinates the collecting
and dissemination of information through
metrological networks and processes

Amodern measurement is therefore concerned with
structuring collaboration and communication
between many measurers and developing common
understandings of what is being measured in
distributed networks. This is a move away from the
construction and application of instruments in
isolation towards a convergent sharing of theoretical
knowledge and data from many instruments

The vehicle for communication is the semiotic
combination of the technological medium (a word, a
measuring instrument, etc.), the thing measured
(time, mass, reading ability, health, etc.), and the
conceptual, theoretical meaning of the ideas
involved ………………
THANK YOU
and remember
We are what we measure.
It's time we measured what we want to be (WPF).
We need to measure what's good in people as
well as what's good for people (RFC).