What is a valid measuring instrument? Recent philosophy has attended to logic of justification of measures, such as construct validation, but not to the question of what it means for an instrument to be a valid measure of a construct. A prominent approach grounds validity in the existence of a causal link between the attribute and its detectable manifestations. Some of its proponents claim that, therefore, validity does not depend on pragmatics and research context. In this paper, I cast doubt on the possibility of a context-independent causal account of validity (what I call unconditional validity). I assess several versions, arguing that all of them fail to judge the validity of measuring instruments correctly. Because different research purposes require different properties from measuring instruments, no account of validity succeeds without referring to the specific research purpose that creates the need for measurement in the first place.

什么是有效的测量工具？最近的哲学关注测量的合理性逻辑，例如结构验证，但没有考虑将工具作为结构的有效测量意味着什么的问题。一个突出的方法是基于属性与其可检测的表现形式之间存在因果关系而建立的有效性。因此，它的一些支持者声称，有效性不依赖于语用和研究背景。在本文中，我对上下文无关的有效性因果关系解释（我称为无条件有效性）的可能性表示怀疑。我评估了几个版本，认为它们都无法正确判断测量仪器的有效性。由于不同的研究目的需要与测量仪器不同的属性，