DESCRIPTIVE TECHNIQUES 115 



of setting them up and reading them in any given case, 

 properly belong in the group of measurement techniques 

 and hence in the definition of the concept under considera- 

 tion. Bavink criticizes the view that the meaning of a 

 physical concept can be completely described in terms of 

 its measured values. All such concepts, he insists, have 

 meaning before the ascription of numbers to their corre- 

 sponding objects. "The difference between two lengths of 

 time, or two degrees of loudness of sound, or a high and low 

 musical note, already forces itself upon the child and the 

 savage, before they have any notion of counting and meas- 

 uring, and pairs of concepts such as loud and soft, long and 

 short, bright and dark, are therefore found at every stage 

 of human thought. Are we then to say of a savage or a 

 child, that they have no concept of loudness of sound or 

 intensity of light, because they are not able, as is the trained 

 physicist, to ascribe numbers to the scale of their sensation? 

 This is surely going too far." 1 The fact to which Bavink 

 refers is frequently forgotten by those who insist that science 

 is aware only of pointer readings. An instrument exhibiting 

 pointers must be both constructed and calibrated. Unless 

 one knew independently of the instrument what the instru- 

 ment was designed to measure, it could never have been 

 created. Thermometers are meaningless unless one knows 

 what heat is; spring balances have no significance unless 

 one knows what force is; lie detectors are valueless unless 

 one knows independently of them what is meant by a lie. 

 A measured value is always a^ value of something, and 

 obtained from that something by a describable technique. 



CONTROL OF SENSE ORGANS 



It is important to notice that the sense organs function 

 in knowledge in the same general way that the physical 

 medium does. In fact the sense organs and nervous system 

 of the observer constitute a new context within which events 

 may be observed. Hence the eye, for example, may properly 



1 Berahard Bavink, The Natural Sciences (New York: Century, 1932), p. 226. 



