In Henry Ely Kyburg (ed.),
Science & reason. New York: Oxford University Press (
1990)
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Abstract
In general, quantities should be interpreted in the same way as random quantities or random variables are interpreted in statistics: namely, as functions from a domain to a special set of objects. The fact that they reflect to some level the structure of a set of mathematical objects makes the range of these functions extraordinary. Measurement, meanwhile, is not a process of “assigning numbers to objects,” but rather of formulating the values of quantity functions given to objects. More briefly, it is giving magnitudes to objects.