Operationism/Operationalism

Operationalism began life in the natural sciences in the work of Percy Bridgman and is a variant of positivism. It specifies that scientific concepts must be linked to instrumental procedures in order to determine their values. “Although a concept such as ‘mass’ may be conceived theoretically or metaphysically as a property, it is only pious opinion…. ‘Mass’ as a property is equivalent to ‘mass’ as inferred from pointer readings” (Blalock, 1961, p. 6).

In the social sciences, operationalism enjoyed a brief spell of acclaim through the work of sociologist George Lundberg (1939). He maintained that sociologists are wrong in believing that ...