This special issue presents a collection of articles that grew out of the “Measurement at the Crossroads” conference held at the University of Paris, June 27–29, 2018.1 It is the third set of publications from an ongoing series of interdisciplinary conferences exploring the history, philosophy and sociology of measurement. It follows from two books, Standardization in Measurement (Schlaudt and Huber 2015) and Reasoning in Measurement (Mössner and Nordmann 2017), based on the “Dimensions of Measurement” conference held in 2013 at Bielefeld University; and from the special issue “The Making of Measurement” published in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science (Mitchell, Tal, and Chang 2017) which came out of the eponymous conference organized in 2015 at the University of Cambridge. The preparation of a fourth conference in 20222 at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, confirms the success of this cycle of conferences...
Introduction: Measurement at the Crossroads
The guest editors would like to thank the University of Paris and the ENSA Paris-Val de Seine for having provided premises to successfully host the 2018 “Measurement at the Crossroads” conference in Paris.
Our thanks extend to our funding sources: the conference was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Institut Humanités, Sciences et Sociétés (IHSS), the SPHERE laboratory and the Laboratoire Matériaux et Phénomènes Quantiques (MPQ) of the University of Paris, the department of History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Paris, the Laboratoire National de métrologie et d’Essais (LNE), and the University of Geneva.
We would like to thank the many people who contributed to the organization of the conference: the organizing committee (with a special thought for Christine Mousset), the program committee, our administrative team (in particular, Laurent Lemoine, Virginie Maouchi and Patricia Philippe), the master students who worked at the reception, and the graphics team. Finally, our thanks go to the colleagues who have helped us put together the publication of this special issue: Karine Chemla, the peer-review committee, our language editor Richard Kennedy, and Perspectives on Science’s editor-in-chief Alexander Levine for hosting and encouraging our publication project.
Fabien Grégis was supported by the Cohn Institute at the University of Tel Aviv, Israel at the time of the organization of the conference; and by the LIUC-Università Cattaneo, Castellanza, Italy, during the preparation of the special issue.