In the end he was willing to dispense with any ultimate privileging of instrumental operations.
There are instrumental operations that are not metrological, and these operations can provide a continuity of meaning, against which metrological validity can be judged (see Section 2.1).
We can put aside his reductive doctrine of meaning, his puritanical search for certainty, and his ambivalent privileging of instrumental operations over other types of operations.
The measured accuracy of cracking energy for stacked films with a nanoscale order is arduous to preserve because of the uncertainty in specimen preparations and instrumental operations.
For example, the operation of length measurement with a meter-stick would be analyzable into the instrumental operations of alignment and concatenation, the perceptual operation of judging spatial coincidence, and the mental operation of counting.
Having distinguished various types of operations, Bridgman also had to deal with the question of whether different types had different epistemic values, going beyond his initial intuitive fondness for instrumental operations.
For example, if the point of operationalizing a concept was to make its meaning clear and precise, which meant using "operations which can be unequivocally performed" (Bridgman 1938, 119), then why were paper-and-pencil operations such as the construction of Euclidean geometric figures not just as good as instrumental operations?
Here again we need to articulate something that Bridgman already did imply: not all instrumental operations are measurement operations as such (for instance, we may know how to make iron melt without thereby obtaining any precise idea of the temperature at which that happens).
Arpaio's "instrumental part" in Operation Intercept, in 1969, also got a mention.
Besides a foothold in the American market, Alcatel could gain access to Bell Labs, the research operation instrumental in creating technologies like the transistor and the laser.
