Abstract
What is the role of measurement in the sociology of culture and how can we sort out the complexities that distinguish qualitative from quantitative approaches to this domain? In this article, we compare the issues and concerns of contemporary scholars who work on matters of culture with the writings of a group of scholars who had prepared papers for a special symposium on scientific measurement held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) back in 1956. We focus on three issues—the recurring need to reinvent measurement (as illustrated by the career of the psychologist S.S. Stevens), the linkage between qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis (as articulated in the writings of the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld), and the assertion (by philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Peter Caws) that theorizing necessarily precedes measuring. We review a number of important advances in the way that measurement is theorized and implemented in the sociology of culture and we also point to a number of enduring dilemmas and conundrums that continue to occupy researchers in the field today.
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Notes
Another interesting case of measurement coming to the fore as a central focus of scientific interest occurred during the rise of the field of nanotechnology (see Harthorn and Mohr 2012).
Churchman enlisted five panel leaders: Paul Lazarsfeld (measurement in the social sciences), Donald Davidson (measurement in the value sciences), Henry Margenau (measurement in the physical sciences), Philburn Ratoosh (formal aspects of measurement), and Sebastian B. Littauer (general aspects of measurement) who in turn recruited an impressive list of authors.
The Arden House Statement marked a major organizational shift for the AAAS. After the war, American scientific fields had begun to grow and professionalize at a rapid pace. “As more and more disciplinary societies began to go their own way and stopped meeting with AAAS it became apparent that, in the words of 1944–1945 president Anton J. Carlson, AAAS needed to ‘find another function or die’… Under the leadership of Warren Weaver, a mathematician and Rockefeller Foundation Executive … the AAAS executive committee scheduled a special conference in September 1951 at Columbia University’s Arden House” (AAAS 2014b). In the summary statement, the AAAS leaders wrote, “in view of the present size and complexity of science, in view of the seriousness and importance of the relation of science to society, and in view of the unique inclusiveness of the AAAS, it seems clear that this organization should devote less of its energies to the more detailed and more isolated technical aspects of science, and devote more of its energies to broad problems that involve the whole of science, the relations of science to government, and indeed the relations of science to our society as a whole … to try to “put science back together” (AAAS 2014a).
This is not the first time that that collection of essays has been scrutinized by sociologists. Aaron Cicourel built much of the argument for his masterly essay on “Measurement and mathematics” (1964) on a close reading and critique of the Churchman and Ratoosh volume. Reading them again today, Cicourel’s admonishments about the dangers of an overly facile mixing of measurement practices across the social and natural sciences continue to be just as applicable and worthy of heeding in 2014 as they were when he wrote them a half century ago.
A second gathering (with the same participants) took place at the University of California, Santa Barbara in early 2014. Other principal participants in these conferences (not included as authors in the current issue) are Jennifer Lena (of Columbia University) and Neil Gross (at the University of British Columbia), both of whom provided papers, commentary, and leadership during the conferences themselves. Other colleagues (Jon Cruz, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Craig Rawlings, and Sarah Thébaud—from the Sociology department at the University of California, Santa Barbara) offered valuable suggestions and critical commentary on the papers. Financial support for this project was provided by a grant from the American Sociological Association Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline and by the generous financial and institutional contributions of the University of British Columbia and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The field of the sociology of culture is a logical choice for other reasons. It is an area that has grown rapidly over the last several decades. Established in 1987, the culture section is now the largest section of the American Sociological Association (and has been so for the last 5 years). Moreover the use of cultural theories and methodologies has taken root in a variety of other sub-areas of sociology—the study of formal organizations, social movements, and social networks, for example. Of course, the emergence of the culture section is itself more of an expression of the rise of a modern culturally grounded social science that has much deeper and wider roots, a topic that we cannot pursue here (see Friedland and Mohr 2004).
Teghtsoonian (2001) traces Stevens’s intellectual lineage back to Wilhelm Wundt who founded the first laboratory for psychological research at the University of Leipzig in 1879 and who is generally credited as the founder of the modern field of experimental psychology (Wundt trained E.B. Titchener, who trained Boring, who trained Stevens). Teghtsoonian also suggests that Stevens’s 3 years of service as a Mormon missionary in Belgium and France (just a few years after the end of World War I) had a significant impact on his (stubborn) character and subsequent career success.
Stevens distinguishes between two classes of sensory information. “The class of prothetic continua includes the ‘quantitative’ aspects of things, whereas the class of metathetic continua includes the ‘qualitative’ and positional aspects, such as pitch, apparent azimuth, and inclination…. On continua such as brightness, loudness, and heaviness, for example, we seem to progress along the continuum by a process of adding excitation to excitation—a prothetic process. The power function seems to be the general law relating subjective and physical magnitudes for Prothetic continua, but not necessarily for metathetic continua. Pitch, for example, is not a power function of frequency” (Stevens 1959, p. 37).
Note that Wundt was a student of Helmholtz.
Stevens elaborates, “Under the modern view, the process of measurement is the process of mapping empirical properties or relations into a formal model. Measurement is possible only because there is a kind of isomorphism between (1) the empirical relations among properties of objects and events and (2) the properties of the formal game in which numerals are the pawns and operators the moves. As Russell put it: ‘Measurement demands some one-one relation between the numbers and magnitudes in question—a relation which may be direct or indirect, important or trivial, according to circumstances [Russell 1937, p.176]’” (Stevens 1959, p. 21).
Stevens also credits his intellectual milieu. “In the meantime, unaware that the British committee was trying to settle the issue, some of us at Harvard were wrestling with similar problems. I remember especially some lively discussions with G.D. Birkhoff, R. Carnap, H. Feigl, C.G. Hempel and G. Bergmann. What I gained from these discussions was a conviction that a more general theory of measurement was needed, and that the definition of measurement should not be limited to one restricted class of empirical operations” (Stevens 1959, p. 23).
Stevens points out that when “Viewed in that perspective, we see that so-called fundamental measurement, the type that was modeled on the rules of additivity, amounts only to an important special case. It specifies particular rules in the form of operations that lead to the assignment of numbers to special magnitudes—numerosity length, weight, and a few others” (Stevens 1975, p. 47).
“… one of the most striking similarities between definition and measurement. Definition requires the replacement of one symbol in an expression by another symbol or symbols; measurement requires the replacement of a symbol by a number, itself also a symbol. It is not far from this point to an identification of the two processes” (Caws 1959, p. 6).
Caws writes, “I’m not sure we always ought to demand a number; certainly, as I hope to show later, we are not bound to use one” (1959, p. 6).
“To it, as objective, must be added what Cassirer calls a ‘subjective index,’ stating the conditions under which it has validity” (Caws 1959, p. 6).
Caws writes, “Measurement thus assigns, in a stipulative fashion, mathematical characteristics to conceptual entities, and enables us to apply what we learn about the organization of the world in one realm to the clarification of the other” (1959, pp. 13–14).
One of the most distinctive characteristics of Cassirer’s work is that he managed to push the Kantian problem of cognitive structure out of the head and into the culture, especially in his work on the philosophy of symbolic forms (Mohr 2010).
One of the ways that we would want to consider interrogating this perspective would be to ask how the rise of practice theory (e.g., Bourdieu 1977, etc.) over the last century will have had an impact on these styles of understanding. This is not the place to take up an extended discussion of this speculation but our quick answer would be to suggest that there is a duality here, in the sense that Cassirer’s philosophical approach still carries water, but that it needs to be complemented by a perspective (such as Bourdieu’s) that emphasizes the ways in which the experience of material embodiment also have an impact on the ways that Kantian categories of understanding come to be constructed. Both are likely to be true.
In the aftermath of World War II (in which large-scale public science projects had played prominent roles), and the growth of the Cold War (with the emergence of new crises such as Sputnik), the United States was entering something of a Golden Age of academic science. Thanks in part to the educational benefits provided to Veterans through the G.I. Bill, universities and colleges were growing (and hiring), public investment in science was becoming institutionalized (through the founding of organizations such as the National Science Foundation) and research science was making significant advances across all fronts (Appel 2000; Clark 2008; Douglass 2007; Geiger 1993; Zachary 1997).
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Mohr, J.W., Ghaziani, A. Problems and prospects of measurement in the study of culture. Theor Soc 43, 225–246 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9227-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9227-2