I am just now embarking on a new project that has me reading about weights and measurement and their relationship to scientific epistemology. I just ran into this:
“When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory.”
Lord Kelvin
“If you cannot measure, measure anyhow”
Frank Knight’s translation of Kelvin for the social sciences.
Somehow this is the best short summation of the assessment problem I have encountered.