ABSTRACT

Of all the authors who have written about measurement through the course of the 20th century, I think one whose work has the most lasting value is Percy Bridgman, the Harvard experimental physicist whose philosophical works gave rise to the doctrine of operationalism. I know that this judgment is quite contrary to the going opinion. Even those philosophers and scientists who do remember something about Bridgman will mostly think of him as someone who proposed a naïve idea of operationalism, whose superficial attractions gathered brief attention that soon faded away. I want to bring back operationalism, or rather the best of Bridgman’s ideas, in a new key. The main motivation for doing so, in the context of the philosophical study of measurement, is to restore attention to the semantic role of measurement. But I do not want to do this in the manner of the simplistic Bridgman who declared that the meaning of a concept consisted solely in the method of its measurement. He actually had a much subtler approach, which I want to develop further on the basis of clues collected from various parts of his work. The revised and revitalized operationalism that I offer in this contribution will be a crucial link in a new empiricist realism that I have proposed in more detail elsewhere (Chang 2012: ch. 4).