The paper examines fundamental problems of widely-defined measurement that lie outside the representation concerns of measurement theory. It is intended as a starting point of a research agenda. It shows that measurement is applied in a wide range of diverse domains of knowledge and enquiry for which a wide-sense definition of measurement is necessary. It examines philosophical objections to the application of measurement. It considers in particular problems of measurand concept formation, validity, verifiability and of theories for the measurand. It (...) concludes that Measurement Science should address the whole range of applications of measurement and should endeavour to provide a universal framework of concepts and principles to address all applications of measurement. (shrink)

Measurement in soft systems generally cannot exploit physical sensors as data acquisition devices. The emphasis in this case is instead on how to choose the appropriate indicators and to combine their values so to obtain an overall result, interpreted as the value of a property, i.e., the measurand, for the system under analysis. This paper aims at discussing the epistemological conditions of the claim that such a process is a measurement, and performance evaluation is the case introduced to support the (...) analysis, performed in systematic comparison with the paradigm of measurement of physical quantities. Some background questions arising here are: – Are the chosen indicators appropriate performance indicators? – Do such indicators convey complete and non-redundant information on performance? – Does the chosen combination rule generate results suitably interpretable as performance values? And enlarging the focus: – Does the obtained value specifically convey information on the system under analysis, instead of some different entity (typically including the subject who is evaluating)? Operatively: would different subjects evaluate the same system in the same way? i.e., is the obtained information objective? – Does the obtained value convey information that is interpretable in the same way by different subjects? Operatively: would different subjects who have agreed on a decision procedure make the same decision from the same performance information? i.e., is the obtained information intersubjective? Any well founded positive answers to these questions significantly support a structural interpretation of measurement encompassing both physical and soft measurement. (shrink)