Abstract
A ubiquitous argument against mental-state accounts of well-being is based on the notion that mental states like happiness and satisfaction simply cannot be measured. The purpose of this paper is to articulate and to assess this “argument from measurability.” My main thesis is that the argument fails: on the most charitable interpretation, it relies on the false proposition that measurement requires the existence of an observable ordering satisfying conditions like transitivity. The failure of the argument from measurability, however, does not translate into a defense of mental-state accounts as accounts of well-being or of measures of happiness and satisfaction as measures of well-being. Indeed, I argue, the ubiquity of the argument from measurability may have obscured other, very real problems associated with mental-state accounts of well-being – above all, that happiness and satisfaction fail to track well-being – and with measures of happiness and satisfaction – above all, the tendency toward reification. I conclude that the central problem associated with the measurement of, e.g., happiness as a subjectively experienced mental state is not that it is too hard to measure, but rather that it is too easy to measure.
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Notes
By contrast, I will ignore what Fehige and Wessels call “the argument from comparability” and I will not challenge the measurability requirement. Not everyone agrees with it: Scanlon (2000) distances himself from the view outlined in the quote above, and Amartya Sen (e.g., 2002) has argued that incomplete orderings need not be an obstacle to social choice. Yet, by and large, proponents of subjective measures of well-being appear to endorse it: “science is about measurement, and if a thing cannot be measured – cannot be compared with a clock or a ruler or something other than itself – it is not a potential object of scientific inquiry” (Gilbert 2006, p. 64).
See Angner (2012) for a more thorough discussion of the two approaches to measurement. The use of the term “theory of measurement” to refer to one specific approach to measurement might generate confusion, but it is the term favored in primary as well as secondary literature.
Not even the most ardent proponents of subjective measures assume the existence of such orderings. And for good reason: as we will see in section 6, empirical evidence suggests that happiness reports are too context dependent to serve the purpose.
The first volume appeared as Krantz et al. (1971).
A reference has been omitted.
For related reasons, the failure of the argument from measurability has no implications for the adequacy of preference-satisfaction accounts of well-being. The argument from measurability is only one argument in favor of such accounts.
References have been omitted.
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Acknowledgment
I am grateful to Zvi Biener, Robyn Dawes, Greg Frost-Arnold, Daniel Hausman, Brian Hepburn, Harold Kincaid, Peter Machamer, Gualtiero Piccinini, Nicholas Rescher, Don Ross, Sam Wren-Lewis, and anonymous referees for constructive comments on earlier drafts. Errors remain my own.
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Angner, E. Is it possible to measure happiness?. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 3, 221–240 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-013-0065-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-013-0065-2