Writing in 1984, O. D. Duncan, in his book, Notes on Social Measurement, called for closer ties across the social sciences and metrology. Duncan argued that the advances in measurement modeling made between the 1920s and the 1960s in the works of Thurstone and Rasch called for intensified dialogues across the sciences. He held “that social measurement should be brought within the scope of historical metrology, while that discipline learns to take advantage of sociological perspectives.” At the time of his passing almost 20 years ago, a colleague referred to Duncan in an obituary as “the most important quantitative sociologist in the world in the latter half of the twentieth century.” The exchange of views desired by Duncan began in earnest in 2008 at an IMEKO TC1-TC7-TC13 Joint Symposium in Annecy, France, and at another held in 2010 in London. Both symposia were held with the guidance of Ludwik Finkelstein, who quite agreed with Duncan, writing that “It is increasingly recognised that the wide range and diverse applications of measurement are based on common logical and philosophical principles and share common problems.” In the years since those symposia, fresh and energetic starts at working through common understandings of those principles and problems have ensued.

This special session will describe work on measurements of previously unquantified constructs being systematically developed in the direction of public values and quality assured metrological traceability. Where contemporary methodologies in many fields today take for granted a permanent incommensurability across instruments with respect to the uniqueness of the ordinal scales that predominate in research and practice, compelling logical, aesthetic, and ethical reasons motivate expectations of and efforts toward the eventual equating and linking of instruments measuring the same thing.