Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 9.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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Date: 2026-05-16 18:48:57+00:00
From: Michele Luchetti <mic.luchetti@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: 2nd CfA/CfC - The New Measurement Heretics edited volume
2nd Call for Abstracts/Call for Chapters
"The New Measurement Heretics"
Edited by Rebecca L. Jackson, Michele Luchetti, Morgan Thompson, Aja Watkins
This edited volume stems from the Measurement Heretics Workshop
<https://medhumsplatform.org/event/measurement-heretics-workshop-being-meaning-and-measuring-well/>:
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 20th century 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
<mailto:measurementheretics@gmail.com>
The deadline for abstract submission is *_June 15^th , 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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