[tpeo]

It would mean what this particular variable has been operationalized [0] to mean. Once upon a time things such as "heat" were just words, and as words they were used in a variety of different implicit senses in which at the time people didn't distinguish -- for whatever reason -- but that people thought that nonetheless were informative about the thing in question. Which is to say that words were used as heuristics, partly as reasonable descriptions, partly as expressions of gut feelings. With the association of heat with thermal expansion and the development of better apparatuses (e.g. the ordinary mercury column thermometers) as well as the diffusion of this concept among laymen though stuff such as weather prediction, it became the most salient form of "heat", and thus the standard use of the word when unqualified came to mean just that: what a thermometer reads. But other forms of heat i.e. the personal feelings of heat associated with climatic comfort, or the action of capsaicin or even wounds -- and this is the origin of the word "inflammation" -- came to be used only when qualified. These are all said to be "subjective heat". Now, I can only claim that all that I've said is merely opinion, since I haven't quite yet worked out to properly cite just who might have said this prior to me and for what reasons -- and which I currently wont, because it's scattered over stuff and I don't know even how to begin -- so this is all provided as is.

About ordinality, as opposed to cardinality, I can only say that I didn't see the connection at the beginning, but now that I've thought a little while about it, it does seem like a philosophically uncomfortable idea. But I'm not going to be the one to say why, at least not now.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operationalization