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Mathematics, Measurement, Metaphor and Metaphysics II

Accounting for Galileo’s ‘Fateful Omission’

Meta Metrics, Inc.wfisher{at}lexile.com

This paper continues the exposition begun in the previous paper (Fisher, 2003b) concerning philosophy’s metaphysical insistence on rigorous figure–meaning independence, and its own distrust of that insistence, turning now to the potential for a new metrological culture that values both the full integration of mathematics and measurement, and frequent, vigorous challenges to that integration. Recent criticisms of psychological measurement as subject to a quantitative or methodological imperative are evaluated in terms of the history of academic metaphysics developed in the previous paper. The thesis is proposed and defended that quantitative instruments effectively embody hermeneutic-mathematical metaphysics’ coordination of signifier and signified only when both within-and between-laboratory metrology studies are completed. Experimental tests of instrument functioning and social networks of laboratories collaborating in the creation and maintenance of metric standards are seen as vital to the emergence of a new metrological culture in the human sciences.

Key Words: mathematical thinking • measurement • metaphysics • method • postmodernism

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