He warned against dogmatic faith in the unity of quantity concepts across these "joints", urging instead that unity be checked against experiments whenever the application of a quantity-concept is to be extended into a new domain.
[22] The term "measurement standard" accordingly has at least two meanings: on the one hand, it is commonly used to refer to abstract rules and definitions that regulate the use of quantity concepts, such as the definition of the meter.
Conventionalism about measurement aims to additionally show that some nontrivial aspects of the application of quantity-concepts, previously not thought to rest on human consensus, are in fact conventional.
On the other hand, the term "measurement standard" is also commonly used to refer to the concrete artifacts and procedures that are deemed exemplary of the application of a quantity concept, such as the metallic bar that served as the standard meter until 1960.
Mach coined the term "principle of coordination" for this sort of conventionally chosen principle for the application of a quantity concept.
This conclusion led Bridgman to claim that currently accepted quantity concepts have "joints" where different operations overlap in their domain of application.
For the sake of standardization, a quantity concept may be any concept employed in quantitative representation, such as a kind of quantity (e.g., temperature), a relation among quantities (e.g., equality among temperature intervals), a measurement unit, or a measurement scale.
Recent studies suggest that the methods used to design, maintain and compare realizations have a direct bearing on the practical application of concepts of quantity, unit and scale, no less than the definitions of those concepts (Tal forthcoming-a; Riordan 2014).
When I asked children about time with their parents, they didn't like the concepts of quantity time versus quality time.
In 1874, Frege completed his Habilitationsschrift, entitled Rechnungsmethoden, die sich auf eine Erweiterung des Grössenbegriffes gründen ("Methods of Calculation Based on an Extension of the Concept of Quantity").
§ 1434.9 Determination of quantity.
