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Modeling and Measurement: The Criterion of Empirical Grounding
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Abstract
A scientific theory offers models for the phenomena in its domain; these models involve theoretical quantities, and a model's structure is the set of relations it imposes on these quantities. A fundamental demand in scientific practice is for those quantities to be clearly and feasibly related to measurement. This demand for empirical grounding can be articulated by displaying the theory-dependent criteria for a procedure to count as a measurement and for identifying the quantity it measures.
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- Fictions, Models and Representation
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- Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association
Footnotes
Research for this article was supported by National Science Foundation grant SES-1026183. An expanded version will appear in a volume edited by Wenceslao Gonzalez. The author wishes to acknowledge helpful discussion and correspondence with Martin Thomson-Jones, Isabelle Peschard, and Michael Weisberg.
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