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

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)

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………

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 ”………..


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

 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

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 mindindependent” (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
……

 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.

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,

 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.

“It is the disorder of the scientific community— the laminated, finite, partially independent strata supporting one another; it is the dis unification 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)

 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 ………………

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).