Abstract

The Making of Measurement is an interdisciplinary conference that seeks to consolidate an emerging international community of scholars interested in the history and/or philosophy of measurement. This new wave of scholarship is still in an embryonic stage and no general conceptual frameworks or schools of thought have yet emerged. Inevitably, tensions exist between methodologically-diverse approaches across the fields of philosophy, history, and sociology of science, particularly with respect to whether measurement outcomes reflect facts about nature, or about human tools and concepts. Hence the goal of this conference to bring together scholars to review recent advances and to identify key issues for further development. This decade is also seeing dramatic changes in the metric system because four scientific units are being redefined in terms of fundamental constants; the contemporary relevance of a systematic approach in the humanities to the study of measurement is therefore particularly strong.