Concept

Measurement

Overview

process of assigning quantities to objects or events

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

Our measurements are conventional to an even greater extent than is admitted by the special theory of relativity. Moreover, every measurement is a physical process carried out with physical material; the result is certainly an experimental datum, but may not be susceptible of the simple interpretation which we ordinarily assign to it. We are, therefore, not going to assume to begin with that we know how to measure…
Bertrand Russell, The A B C of Relativity
States what Measurement is; names Measurement several times.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
For this, as we have seen, we require superposition, which involves Free Mobility and homogeneity--the absence of Free Mobility in time, where all other requisites of measurement are fulfilled, renders direct measurement of time impossible. Hence infinite divisibility, free mobility, and homogeneity are necessary for the possibility of measurement in _any_ continuous manifold, and these, as we have seen, are…
Bertrand Russell, An essay on the foundations of geometry
Names Measurement several times; states what Measurement is.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
Why is one a possible measuring rod and the other not so? The meaning of congruence lies beyond the self-identity of the object. In other words measurement presupposes the measurable, and the theory of the measurable is the theory of congruence.
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
Names Measurement several times; opens on Measurement.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Measurement

Overview

Possible passages

Philosophers who discussed Measurement

Related ideas

Place in the tradition