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Modeling and Measurement: The Criterion of Empirical Grounding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Bas C. van Fraassen
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Abstract

A scientific theory offers models for the phenomena in its domain; these models involve theoretical quantities, and a model's structure is the set of relations it imposes on these quantities. A fundamental demand in scientific practice is for those quantities to be clearly and feasibly related to measurement. This demand for empirical grounding can be articulated by displaying the theory-dependent criteria for a procedure to count as a measurement and for identifying the quantity it measures.

Type
Fictions, Models and Representation
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 79 , Issue 5 , December 2012 , pp. 773 - 784
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Research for this article was supported by National Science Foundation grant SES-1026183. An expanded version will appear in a volume edited by Wenceslao Gonzalez. The author wishes to acknowledge helpful discussion and correspondence with Martin Thomson-Jones, Isabelle Peschard, and Michael Weisberg.

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