A modelling strategy that accounts for measurement outside the laboratory, where one cannot base measurements on a single simple law, will have to drop the requirement that the model is a homomorphic mapping of the empirical relational structure. The model used for measurement will be a...

Mathematical models are instruments of investigation, epistemological equivalent to the microscope and the telescope. In comparing the epistemological difference between models and experiments, Morgan (2005) argues that experiments offer greater epistemic power than models as a means to...

The Representational Theory of Measurement conceives measurement as establishing homomorphisms from empirical relational structures into numerical relation structures, called models. Models function as measuring instruments by transferring observations of an economic system into quantitative...

The metrology literature neglects a strong empirical measurement tradition in economics, which is different from the traditions as accounted for by the formalist representational theory of measurement. This empirical tradition comes closest to Mari's characterization of measurement in which he...

Halfway through the 1930s, a new practice was born that was based on instruments called 'models'. This practice is characterized by building and applying empirical models, i.e. representations of (aspects of) the world. The aim of this chapter is to explore these kinds of representations

In the social sciences we hardly can create laboratory conditions, we only can try to find out which kinds of experiments Nature has carried out. Knowledge about Nature’s designs can be used to infer conditions for reliable predictions. This problem was explicitly dealt with in Haavelmo’s...

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, a large number of price index number formulae have been developed, mostly named after their inventors, such as the Paasche and Layspeyres indexes. Parallel with the invention of new index formulae, criteria were developed for distinguishing between...

The assessment of models in an experiment depends on their material nature and their function in the experiment. Models that are used to make the phenomenon under investigation visible - sensors - are assessed by calibration. However, calibration strategies assume material intervention. The...

The article discusses economic models as instruments of measuring economic phenomena from obtainable numerical facts; as in the theory of measurement where measurement is the mapping of a property of the empirical world into sets of numbers. Contributions of notable people such as Ragnar Frisch...

Because an economy is a complex system, economists encounter a gap between theory and application. To do justice to the complexity of the economy, more and more comprehensive models were built. This development was not justified by its results: more comprehensiveness did not lead to better...