ABSTRACT

Until recently, researchers in the history and philosophy of science have largely ignored the ways in which communities of inquirers collectively think through problems via their coordinated behaviors. Via metrology, natural phenomena first assert their independent existence across intralaboratory experiments and are then systematically coordinated so that any measure made anywhere is connected via a traceable network to a reference standard. It is because of the way that mathematical and geometrical figures converge with and separate from the meaning they carry that Plato required mathematical training of the students admitted to his Academy. What metrology does in its intralaboratory ruggedness studies and interlaboratory trials is first test for the possibility of quantitative idealization, and then realize it through the large-scale, socially networked coordination of data standards when the ruggedness tests indicate that this coordination is viable. Ethical, social, economic, and aesthetic explanations have become of interest only recently, as has concern with technology.