Philosophical and Foundational Issues in Measurement Theory

6	The Structuralist View of Measurement: An Extension of Received Measurement Theories

Wolfgang Balzer¹

Seminar fur Philosophize, Logik, und Wissenschaftstheorie

Munchen, FRG

 

There is a vast literature on measurement and on the relation to theory of measurement, experience, evidence.² With few exceptions, these accounts have cases of simple, isolated, empirical, numerical hypotheses, like the ideal gas law, Ohm’s law or Pythagoras’ theorem, as their paradigm examples from which the general ideas are drawn and against which they are checked. However, scientific progress leads from those isolated beginnings to comprehensive networks of theories in which the systems originally studied form only small fragments. New devices of measurement ...