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  1. Metaphysics and Convention in Dimensional Analysis, 1914-1917.Mahmoud Jalloh - 2024 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 14 (2):275-322.
    This paper recovers an important, century-old debate regarding the methodological and metaphysical foundations of dimensional analysis. Consideration of Richard Tolman's failed attempt to install the principle of similitude---the relativity of size---as the founding principle of dimensional analysis both clarifies the method of dimensional analysis and articulates two metaphysical positions regarding quantity dimensions. Tolman's position is quantity dimension fundamentalism. This is a commitment to dimensional realism and a set of fundamental dimensions which ground all further dimensions. The opposing position, developed primarily (...)
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  • Calibrating the theory of model mediated measurement: metrological extension, dimensional analysis, and high pressure physics.Mahmoud Jalloh - 2024 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (40):1-32.
    I argue that dimensional analysis provides an answer to a skeptical challenge to the theory of model mediated measurement. The problem arises when considering the task of calibrating a novel measurement procedure, with greater range, to the results of a prior measurement procedure. The skeptical worry is that the agreement of the novel and prior measurement procedures in their shared range may only be apparent due to the emergence of systematic error in the exclusive range of the novel measurement procedure. (...)
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  • In Defence of Dimensions.Caspar Jacobs - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    The distinction between dimensions and units in physics is commonplace. But are dimensions a feature of reality? The most widely-held view is that they are no more than a tool for keeping track of the values of quantities under a change of units. This anti-realist position is supported by an argument from underdetermination: one can assign dimensions to quantities in many different ways, all of which are empirically equivalent. In contrast, I defend a form of dimensional realism, on which some (...)
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  • Pictures, models, and measures.S. G. Sterrett - 2017 - Belgrade Philosophical Annual 30 (30):99-137.
    In this paper, I enrich the context of Wittgenstein's Tractatus given over a decade ago in my book Witttgenstein Flies A Kite (and related earlier works dating from 2000). I've since located a sketch reprinted from a 1914 Paris magazine showing a lawyer using a model bus and dolls to depict a traffic accident; I present it here along with a discussion of the modelmaker movement of that time. The modelmaker movement was a movement at the intersection of popular culture (...)
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  • From artefacts to atoms - A new SI for 2018 to be based on fundamental constants.Terry Quinn - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 65:8-20.
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  • What's nu? A re-examination of Maxwell's ‘ratio-of-units’ argument, from the mechanical theory of the electromagnetic field to ‘On the elementary relations between electrical measurements’.Daniel Jon Mitchell - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 65:87-98.
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  • The making of measurement: Editors’ introduction.Daniel Jon Mitchell, Eran Tal & Hasok Chang - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 65:1-7.
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  • “The Etherealization of Common Sense?” Arithmetical and Algebraic Modes of Intelligibility in Late Victorian Mathematics of Measurement.Daniel Jon Mitchell - 2019 - Archive for History of Exact Sciences 73 (2):125-180.
    The late nineteenth century gradually witnessed a liberalization of the kinds of mathematical object and forms of mathematical reasoning permissible in physical argumentation. The construction of theories of units illustrates the slow and difficult spread of new “algebraic” modes of mathematical intelligibility, developed by leading mathematicians from the 1830s onwards, into elementary arithmetical pedagogy, experimental physics, and fields of physical practice like telegraphic engineering. A watershed event in this process was a clash that took place during 1878 between J. D. (...)
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  • No actual measurement … was required: Maxwell and Cavendish's null method for the inverse square law of electrostatics.Isobel Falconer - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 65:74-86.
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  • Dimensions.S. Sterrett - 2022 - In Eleanor Knox & Alastair Wilson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics. London, UK: Routledge.
    This chapter concerns dimensions as the term is used in the physical sciences today. Some key points made are: Quantities of the same kind have the same dimension; but that two quantities have the same dimension does not necessarily mean they are of the same kind. The dimension of a quantity is not determined for a single quantity in isolation, but relative to a system of quantities and the relations that hold between them. Dimensions, units, and quantities are distinct notions. (...)
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