Operationalism

The theory of operationalism grew out of the work of Percy Bridgman, a Nobel Prize–winning American physicist, who was looking for a way to create operational awareness in his laboratory. Operationalism theory holds that concepts should be determined by the operations that create scientific understanding. Bridgman needed a way to measure the increasing pressure from the experiments he was conducting. He was concerned that, as his expertise in his field grew, he would not be able to measure or understand his results. His book The Logic of Modern Physics (1927) was intended to be a reflection on his personal physics experiments and to give meaning to the scientific method. Bridgman was seeking a way to rid physics of the metaphysical concepts of the time as ...