Coordination and Measurement: What We Get Wrong about What Reichenbach Got Right
Abstract
In his Scientific Representation (2008), van Fraassen argues that measuring
is a form of representation. In fact, every measurement pinpoints its
target in accordance with specific operational rules within an already-constructed
theoretical space, in which certain conceptual interconnections can be represented.
Reichenbach’s 1920 account of coordination is particularly interesting in this
connection. Even though recent reassessments of this account do not do full
justice to some important elements lying behind it, they do have the merit of
focusing on a different aspect of his early work that traditional interpretations of
relativized a priori principles have unfortunately neglected in favour of a more
“structural” role for coordination. In Reichenbach’s early work, however, the idea
of coordination was employed not only to indicate theory-specific fundamental
principles such as the ones suggested in the literature on conventional principles
in science, but also to refer to more “basic” assumptions. In Reichenbach, these
principles are preconditions both of the individuation of physical magnitudes and of
their measurement, and, as such, they are necessary to approach the world in the first
instance. This paper aims to reassess Reichenbach’s approach to coordination and to
the representation of physical quantities in light of recent literature on measurement
and scientific representation.