The Plane of Existence

Experiments produce tokens of types of things, not particular things. The criteria for a type is a measurement. A token is one of several things that can take the part of "thing measured" in that measurement. The type is the criteria for being one of these things. We can do an experiment on a rock employed as a token of the type ”mass” but not on a particular rock, for the experiment must be repeatable elsewhere. In another place not the rock, but a pound of sugar might play the part of “mass.” Either, in this experiment, is a mass because it can play a certain part in a measurement of mass. Whether something is a token of a type or a particular thing depends upon what we do with it.

 

Science is experiment, that is a collection of repeatable procedures with a predicted result, but not everything we do can be part of an experiment. All human action that does not involve tokens of types—giving birth, marrying, dying – indeed most of what is important in human life, does not involve activities that could be procedures in experiments. Your wife, child, or dead father is not, as part of your life, a token of a type wife, child, or father, replaceable by any other. Since being “human' is particular, treating people as tokens of a type is to dehumanize them. Comparisons are odious.

 

The procedure to measure mass, or anything else, whenever done, is a token of the typical procedure. That is why it is repeatable. Since the criteria for something being a token of a certain type is a measurement, what is the criteria for a performance of a measurement being a token of the type of that performance? Within an experiment a measurement can be repeated. You can check your work. The identity of the repeated results, the announcement of the same number, is the guarantee that the performance is a proper token of the type. Successful repetition of a measurement within an experiment is the criteria for calling that procedure a token of the type of that measurement. A failure of repetition is the criteria for declaring a measurement was not a correct measurement.

 

To measure the length of a straight line we place the end of a meter stick at one end and, then without allowing the meter stick to move, notice which of the numbered marks on the meter stick is beside the other end. The number beside that mark is the distance. The distance was not “out there” but was the product of the procedure. The number the measurement produced is not in the landscape. To find the number people must perform the operation. Science is a collection of things that we do, not a study of nature.

 

Those who perform the operation and do not get the same result are excluded from further scientific education. The criteria for a measurement being a token of the type of that measurement is that the community of “scientists” who have demonstrated their ability to get the same result, get the same result. For the same reason these scientists will be able to perform one another's experiments. They are scientists because when they repeat standard procedures they get the standard result. Science always remains within the realm of what we do. These scientists are tokens of the type “scientist.”

 

But what of measurements of distance in a different experiment, for example, the distance between two points on an irregular rock? The meter stick cannot be placed alongside it. In this case we must devise some alternative procedure, though still done with standard steps. We might also want to measure the distance up and down along the irregularities of the rock. We might employ a string, and lay it up and down along the irregularities and so on.. "Distance" like other words, has its meaning only with respect to our purpose when using it. 

 

Are the two different measurements of distance tokens of the same type? They might or might not be, depending upon how this step takes part in a larger experiment. If either can be used in a particular larger experiment to replace the other then yes, otherwise no. Tokens and types depend upon what we are doing. An object is a particular or a token of one type rather than another because of how we employ it. Two procedures are tokens of the same type if they can substitute for one another in the experiment we are doing. Different measurement procedures for distance with the same name are, like procedures named by the word “slab,” sometimes interchangeable, and sometimes not. We do not measure the length of a nano particle with the same procedure we use to measure the distance between stars. Because they use the same word we tend to imagine something, “distance,” that underlies them all in some way. But this imagined distance plays no scientific part other than perhaps helping us to remember what to do. We ourselves and what we are trying to do are integral to experiments. But the Scientific World Picture operates without us.

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The word “how” in science is a request for instruction about a procedure. To ask, for example, how the motion of particles can result in “consciousness” is not to ask a scientific question, for it does not ask how to do something. It makes sense only within the imaginary Scientific World Picture. Those who are fascinated by such questions, of course, are free to pursue them.