Beauchemin, Pierre-Hugues and Staley, Kent (2025) Making Measurement Useful: Integrating Measurement, Uncertainty, and Sensitivity. [Preprint]
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Abstract
We employ a pragmatist model of inquiry to explain how measurement in physics can solve the problem of usefulness. In spite of the fact that a variety of resources, including theory, simulation, heuristics, rules of thumb, and practical considerations contribute to the context of a specific measurement inquiry, the measurement inquiry process partially decontextualizes its results, making them useful for other inquiries. This measurement inquiry process involves a process of transformation of data we call "entheorization," which happens in conjunction with the evaluation of uncertainty of measurement results. These uncertainty estimates then serve to define the sensitivity of the result to the aims of subsequent inquiries. On this approach, the epistemology of measurement requires treating measurement procedure, uncertainty estimation, and sensitivity to targets of inquiry as equally fundamental to understanding how measurement yields knowledge. To help understand how the abstract elements of our epistemological model of experimental inquiries are applicable to concrete episodes of measurement, we use the example of the W-boson mass measurement at the Large Hadron Collider to illustrate our arguments.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | |||||||||
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| Keywords: | measurement, pragmatism, inquiry, experiment, uncertainty, evidence | |||||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Data General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Experimentation Specific Sciences > Physics > Fields and Particles |
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| Depositing User: | Kent Staley | |||||||||
| Date Deposited: | 01 Aug 2025 13:00 | |||||||||
| Last Modified: | 01 Aug 2025 13:00 | |||||||||
| Item ID: | 26080 | |||||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Data General Issues > Evidence General Issues > Experimentation Specific Sciences > Physics > Fields and Particles |
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| Date: | 31 July 2025 | |||||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/26080 |
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