In an effort to vanguard a collaborative online presence in my ‘inter’department of choice, the UCSD STS Program, I’m happy to introduce myself and make this site the home of my academic perambulations, and maybe even a coherent argument or two.
First, the intro:
Travis Chamberlain, MSc
Masters of Science: Philosophy of Policy
London School of Economics, 2009
Fourth Year Grad Student at UCSD
Current research emphasis:
Philosophy of Measurement (Metrology), especially
quantitative measurement of human well being and the problem of incommensurability. I focus on two different traditions within that inform the creation of current human well-being measures, including work on multi-dimensional poverty measurement by Sabina Alkire and James Foster, as well as recent index-based innovations by Agnese Peruzzi and Jaya Krishnakumar.
I use philosophical analysis to trace the development of human well-being measures and offer a coherence-based criticism of the conceptualization, representation, and operationalization of standards of human well-being. This coherentist method of analysis is an extension of a theory of measurement offered by Norman Bradburn and Nancy Cartwright. It also traces back to an iterative theory of measure refinement offered by Hasok Chang.