Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 424.
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        Date: 2026-04-17 09:23:20+00:00
        From: Michele Luchetti <mic.luchetti@gmail.com>
        Subject: CfA - The New Measurement Heretics edited volume

The New Measurement Heretics
Edited by Rebecca L. Jackson, Michele Luchetti, Morgan Thompson, 
Aja Watkins

This edited volume stems from the Measurement Heretics Workshop: Being, Meaning, 
and Measuring Well, organized by Rebecca Jackson at Durham University on 
March 11-13, 2026. We warmly welcome proposals from researchers in the philosophy, 
history, sociology, and anthropology of measurement (broadly construed) who would 
like to address the themes in the description below.

Once the list of contributions is selected, the volume proposal will be submitted 
for consideration to Chicago University Press.

Topic description

What we measure, and how we measure, matters deeply. In
the human sciences especially, the definition and status of what we call
“measurement,” the distinguishing or desirable features of measurement, and
whether (and when) we should measure at all, has seen a resurgence of interest
and debate. This volume engages with scientific, medical, and social measuring
practices of the past and present, inviting contributions that dissect and
reform the meaning and desirability of fundamental notions in philosophy of
measurement—or as we call them, measurement heresies.

This is not the first time fundamental notions in measurement, or “dogmas”, 
have been challenged in disparate areas of study. The current wave of 
philosophically influenced history of measurement owes its roots to works such 
as Chang’s Inventing Temperature (2004), which troubled the dogma that accurate 
instruments require a prior foundation of true theories of what is being 
measured. Prior to this, sociological and historical work had already troubled 
the separation between the purity of numbers and the messiness of human knowers, 
showing that the growing emphasis on quantification in the 19th and 20th century 
was marked by the influence of bureaucracy and social agendas more than it 
mirrored the practice of physicists (Porter 1995; Collins 1975; Gould 1981). 

Looking further back, stances that today are well within the orthodoxy were once 
at the center of heated debates. The Kantian dogma of the non-measurability of 
psychological properties was challenged by Fechner’s “heretical” psychophysics, 
which on the one hand initiated a long and influential debate on the 
quantifiability of sensation and, on the other, inspired Mach’s relational theory 
of measurement in physics that seeded later developments in measurement theory 
and philosophical debates on the nature of measurement. Waves of reform and 
reaction in the 20thcentury included tension between physicists and 
psychophysicists (Campbell 1920; Stevens 1946), and theories of measurement as 
foundational to the project of logical positivism (Reichenbach 1927; Carnap 1966). 
When psychometric visions and techniques were first beginning to shape theory of 
measurement in psychology (Cronbach and Meehl 1955; Campbell and Fiske 1959), 
reformist projects led to the beginning of the representational theory of 
measurement in the physical sciences (Krantz et al. 1971; Suppes et al. 1989; 
Luce et al. 1990). 

Reconciling the two has proven difficult but philosophically productive, as
several volumes and special issues have shown (Berglund et al. 2013; Vessonen
2017; Pendrill 2019; Mari et al. 2023; Uher 2025; Basso et al. 2026; Luchetti
2026). More recently, works on patient-centered and health measures have
challenged the dogma that measurement can, and should, be carried out from a
stance of aperspectival objectivity (Duque et al. 2024; McClimans 2024). 

There is still much to be done to bring the dogmas of philosophers, inherited 
from the above mentioned 20th century reformist projects, to face the challenge 
of measuring in biomedical, clinical, and social contexts. A particular challenge
here is to measure that which is unique or highly contextual, such as the lived
experience of persons, and to measure moving targets that are more affected by,
than reflected by, data meant to capture them (Godman & Marchionni 2022;
Runhardt 2025; Zahle 2023). This work has been ongoing in medical humanities,
sociological, historical, geographical, anthropological, and literary
scholarship, as well as in geophysical and environmental sciences, in ways that
have not yet been articulated together. 

This volume brings the heresies (and the heretics) together, to map the terrain 
of the current re-evaluation which is taking place in Measurement Studies more 
broadly.

The purpose of this book is to give space to critical re-evaluations of dogmas 
regarding fundamental notions about measurement and to invite novel interpretations 
of formal and informal measurement concepts. We invite contributions focusing on 
topics including (but not limited to) the following:·       
STANDARDISATION·       
COMPARABILITY·       
QUANTIFICATION, QUANTITIES, and/or MAGNITUDES ·       
MEASUREMENT SCALES·       
PRECISION and/or RELIABILITY·       
VALIDITY and/or VALIDATION ·       
ACCURACY and/or SENSITIVITY/SPECIFICITY·       
PROXIES

We also invite contributions that are critical of the activity of measurement in 
general:
What are the affective and real-world impacts of measuring and being measured on 
human and non-human
subjects?
When is it worse to measure at all, and when is it worth it to measure (even badly) 
to provide voice to marginalized actors within a system? 
What would it look like to gather evidence against measurement itself, as being an
intervention? 

Rather than chapters taking the form of a strictly circumscribed
philosophical argument, we invite authors to address one of the above
topics from their own disciplinary perspective. We expect chapters to reference
a case or cases from past or present measuring practices. The editorial team
will explicate the broader philosophical implications in the introductory and
concluding chapters.

Confirmed contributors

Nicholas Binney (HHU Düsseldorf)
Femke Truijens (University of Rotterdam)
Riana Betzler (San José State University)

Submission details

Please submit an abstract aimed at an interdisciplinary audience (600-800 words, 
not including references) to the following email address: 
measurementheretics@gmail.com

The deadline for abstract submission is June 15th, 2026. Authors of selected 
contributions will be notified at the end of July. An authors’ workshop will take 
place online in November 2026, and the final submission of the chapters (6k-8k words) 
is planned for March 2027.

--Michele Luchetti
Lecturer
Universität Bielefeld/Bard College
Berlin
E-mail: m.luchetti@berlin.bard.edu


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