Abstract
In contemporary philosophy of measurement prominent philosophers (van Fraassen 2008; Chang 2004; Tal 2011) have explicitly or implicitly recognized the role the hermeneutic circle plays in measurement. Specifically, they have recognized its role in what is sometimes referred to as the “coordination problem”. Yet in these accounts the hermeneutic aspect of measurement is often minimized, giving way to standardization, modeling and other concerns. In this essay I discuss the tension between the hermeneutics and standardization of measurement and offer an alternative account of measurement. In my account, the hermeneutic circle is the constant companion of measurement with standardization making time limited appearances. The coordination problem asks how we imbue our measuring instruments with empirical significance. In other words, how do we coordinate our measuring instruments with the phenomena we want them to assess? In the empirical literature on measurement, the coordination problem is sometimes discussed in terms of validity, i.e. ensuring a measuring instrument measures what it intends to measure. The problem associated with coordination (or validity) is that it confronts a circle: If I want to know if my measuring instrument does a good job of capturing the phenomena of interest--say temperature or humidity or quality of life--then it seems that I need to know already a great deal about temperature, humidity or quality of life. I need to know, for instance, how temperature fluctuates across locations or people at a single point in time, or how quality of life changes with disease trajectory. Yet this information is precisely what the measuring instrument is designed to provide. So, how can we ever coordinate our instruments? To answer this question, I examine Hasok Chang’s discussion of coherentism in measurement. As I will illustrate, his proposal has much in common with philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer, 2004), nonetheless, it emphasizes the stabilization of the hermeneutic circle over time. We might think of this stabilization as a point in time when we know enough about the phenomena of interest such that all the questions we want to ask (for a particular purpose) are answered by the measuring instrument. Once we reach stabilization, if the measuring instrument gives us an answer we don’t expect, we tend to call it error or bias. Achieving stability usually means that the phenomena of interest can be standardized, and at least for some metrologists, measurement has been achieved. Yet when we look closer, standards get revised, some phenomena are never standardized, some measures are never stabilized, and questions of coordination continue to haunt measurement well-beyond their sell-by date. What is going on? I suggest that the quintessence of measurement is not standardization, but rather hermeneutic dialogue. Sometimes this dialogue becomes stagnant, stability and standardization ensue. But this is the exception and not the rule. Indeed, scientific progress relies on it.
