noun
- Plural of operationism; philosophical or methodological approaches that define concepts or entities primarily in terms of the operations or procedures used to measure, test, or produce them.
Usage: technical; philosophy of science; rare in everyday usage
Examples
- Different operationisms in physics may define temperature differently based on the measurement procedures employed.
- The debate between operationisms and realism has shaped modern philosophy of science.
- Strict operationisms require that all scientific terms be reducible to observable operations.