- “Quantification was a w
ay of claiming status… even the social anthropologists counted coconuts” (McCloskey, who, for the avoidance of doubt, was not suggesting this is a good thing!) - “Measurements presuppose theories” (Popper)
- Even when just describing a new dataset “we cannot avoid applying to it certain abstract ideas, acquired from somewhere or other but certainly not just from the new observations alone.” (Freud)
- Quantification is not something “that can effectively be sought by measuring” (Kuhn)