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by extension, science and epistemology in general), and we look forward to the
conversations that will follow.
For whom did we write this book
We see the contents of this book as being of interest to anyone who is concerned
with the basic underpinnings of measurement, across (as we indicate in our title) the
physical sciences, including biological and geological sciences, and the human sciences, including psychology and sociology, and application areas such as health,
education, and management. Moreover, this book should be of interest to anyone
who works on developing measuring instruments, especially in fields where the
basic foundations may be unclear (such as in the measurement of novel properties
in the physical sciences) or where there has been some dispute about basic foundations (such as in the human sciences).
The book could also be used in courses on measurement and/or measurement
applications. In designing a course in, say, foundations of measurement, one could
use it as the basis for the initial part of the course (with selected extra readings to
accompany each chapter), followed by selected readings to focus on particular
issues and/or application areas.
The structure of the chapters in this book
The sequence of chapters follows a conceptual path, and therefore we see that the
best strategy is to read them from the first to the last. But, at the same time, each
chapter was designed to be self-contained and therefore readable independently of
the others (including having its own section of references). The arguments that we
develop in this book have a simple and basically linear structure:
Preface