1. A philosophical approach that defines concepts and scientific terms by the operations or procedures used to measure or determine them, rather than by abstract properties.
Usage: philosophy of science; formal/technical

Examples

• Operationalism insists that 'temperature' should be defined by how we measure it with a thermometer, not by abstract molecular motion.
• The physicist adopted operationalism to ensure that all scientific definitions could be tested through concrete experimental procedures.
• Critics argue that operationalism is too restrictive because it limits meaning to observable operations alone.
• In operationalism, the meaning of a concept is determined entirely by the set of operations used to verify it.
• The theory of operationalism emerged in early 20th-century physics as a response to debates about the nature of scientific concepts.