[spsp-members] CfA - The New Measurement Heretics edited volume
Michele Luchetti via spsp-members
*The New Measurement Heretics*
Edited by Rebecca L. Jackson, Michele Luchetti, Morgan Thompson, Aja Watkins
This edited volume stems from the *Measurement Heretics Workshop*
<https://medhumsplatform.org/event/measurement-heretics-workshop-being-meaning-and-measuring-well/>*:
Being, Meaning, and Measuring Well,* organized by Rebecca Jackson at Durham
University on March 11-13, 2026. We warmly welcome proposals from
researchers in the philosophy, history, sociology, and anthropology of
measurement (broadly construed) who would like to address the themes in the
description below.
Once the list of contributions is selected, the volume proposal will be
submitted for consideration to Chicago University Press.
*Topic description*
What we measure, and how we measure, matters deeply. In the human sciences
especially, the definition and status of what we call “measurement,” the
distinguishing or desirable features of measurement, and whether (and when)
we should measure at all, has seen a resurgence of interest and debate.
This volume engages with scientific, medical, and social measuring
practices of the past and present, inviting contributions that dissect and
reform the meaning and desirability of fundamental notions in philosophy of
measurement—or as we call them, measurement heresies.
This is not the first time fundamental notions in measurement, or “dogmas”,
have been challenged in disparate areas of study. The current wave of
philosophically influenced history of measurement owes its roots to works
such as Chang’s *Inventing Temperature* (2004), which troubled the dogma
that accurate instruments require a prior foundation of true theories of
what is being measured. Prior to this, sociological and historical work had
already troubled the separation between the purity of numbers and the
messiness of human knowers, showing that the growing emphasis on
quantification in the 19th and 20th century was marked by the influence of
bureaucracy and social agendas more than it mirrored the practice of
physicists (Porter 1995; Collins 1975; Gould 1981). Looking further back,
stances that today are well within the orthodoxy were once at the center of
heated debates. The Kantian dogma of the non-measurability of psychological
properties was challenged by Fechner’s “heretical” psychophysics, which on
the one hand initiated a long and influential debate on the quantifiability
of sensation and, on the other, inspired Mach’s relational theory of
measurement in physics that seeded later developments in measurement theory
and philosophical debates on the nature of measurement. Waves of reform and
reaction in the 20th century included tension between physicists and
psychophysicists (Campbell 1920; Stevens 1946), and theories of measurement
as foundational to the project of logical positivism (Reichenbach 1927;
Carnap 1966). When psychometric visions and techniques were first beginning
to shape theory of measurement in psychology (Cronbach and Meehl 1955;
Campbell and Fiske 1959), reformist projects led to the beginning of the
representational theory of measurement in the physical sciences (Krantz et
al. 1971; Suppes et al. 1989; Luce et al. 1990). Reconciling the two has
proven difficult but philosophically productive, as several volumes and
special issues have shown (Berglund et al. 2013; Vessonen 2017; Pendrill
2019; Mari et al. 2023; Uher 2025; Basso et al. 2026; Luchetti 2026). More
recently, works on patient-centered and health measures have challenged the
dogma that measurement can, and should, be carried out from a stance of
aperspectival objectivity (Duque et al. 2024; McClimans 2024).
There is still much to be done to bring the dogmas of philosophers,
inherited from the above mentioned 20th century reformist projects, to face
the challenge of measuring in biomedical, clinical, and social contexts. A
particular challenge here is to measure that which is unique or highly
contextual, such as the lived experience of persons, and to measure moving
targets that are more affected by, than reflected by, data meant to capture
them (Godman & Marchionni 2022; Runhardt 2025; Zahle 2023). This work has
been ongoing in medical humanities, sociological, historical, geographical,
anthropological, and literary scholarship, as well as in geophysical and
environmental sciences, in ways that have not yet been articulated
together. This volume brings the heresies (and the heretics) together, to
map the terrain of the current re-evaluation which is taking place in
Measurement Studies more broadly.
The purpose of this book is to give space to critical re-evaluations of
dogmas regarding fundamental notions about measurement and to invite novel
interpretations of formal and informal measurement concepts. We invite
contributions focusing on topics including (but not limited to) the
following:
· STANDARDISATION
· COMPARABILITY
· QUANTIFICATION, QUANTITIES, and/or MAGNITUDES
· MEASUREMENT SCALES
· PRECISION and/or RELIABILITY
· VALIDITY and/or VALIDATION
· ACCURACY and/or SENSITIVITY/SPECIFICITY
· PROXIES
We also invite contributions that are critical of the activity of
measurement in general:
- What are the affective and real-world impacts of measuring and being
measured on human and non-human subjects?
- When is it worse to measure at all, and when is it worth it to measure
(even badly) to provide voice to marginalized actors within a system?
- What would it look like to gather evidence *against* measurement
itself, as being an intervention?
Rather than chapters taking the form of a strictly circumscribed
philosophical argument, we invite authors to address *one of the above
topics* from their own disciplinary perspective. We expect chapters to
reference a case or cases from past or present measuring practices. The
editorial team will explicate the broader philosophical implications in the
introductory and concluding chapters.
*Confirmed contributors*
- Nicholas Binney (HHU Düsseldorf)
- Femke Truijens (University of Rotterdam)
- Riana Betzler (San José State University)
*Submission details*
Please submit an abstract aimed at an interdisciplinary audience (600-800
words, not including references) to the following email address:
measureme...@gmail.com
The deadline for abstract submission is *June 15th, 2026*. Authors of
selected contributions will be notified at the end of July. An authors’
workshop will take place online in November 2026, and the final submission
of the chapters (6k-8k words) is planned for March 2027.
--
*Michele Luchetti*
*Lecturer*
Universität Bielefeld/Bard College Berlin
E-mail: m.luc...@berlin.bard.edu
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