Theodore M Porter
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 112624 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Theodore M Porter |
| NOMBRES | Theodore M |
| APELLIDO | Porter |
| FIRMA | PORTER T M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of California, Los Angeles |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 78 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 351 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 77 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1985 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
New historical and philosophical perspectives on quantitative genetics
Five ways to ensure that models serve society
Revenge of the Humdrum
Bureaucracy, so often demeaned, should be understood as an embodied means for the production and deployment of knowledge. Its reputation as humdrum and rule-bound is not necessarily undeserved, yet it makes possible a variety of activities on a scale that would otherwise be out of reach. Here we survey and ponder some of its diverse forms as they have adapted to diverse aims and circumstances evolved over several centuries
Trust in Numbers
What accounts for the prestige of quantitative methods? The usual answer is that quantification is desirable in social investigation as a result of its successes in science. This book questions whether such success in the study of stars, molecules, or cells should be an attractive model for research on human societies, and examines why the natural sciences are highly quantitative in the first place. The book argues that a better understanding of …
The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900
This book explores the history of statistics from the field's origins in the nineteenth century through to the factors that produced the burst of modern statistical innovation in the early twentieth century. The book shows that statistics was not developed by mathematicians and then applied to the sciences and social sciences. Rather, the field came into being through the efforts of social scientists, who saw a need for statistical tools in their…
Founder of Modern Economics
Book Review| August 01 2019 Founder of Modern Economics: Paul Samuelson. Volume 1: Becoming Samuelson, 1915–1948 by Roger E. Backhouse Founder of Modern Economics: Paul Samuelson. Volume 1: Becoming Samuelson, 1915–1948. By Backhouse, Roger E.. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xxii; 736 pp. $34.95. Theodore M. Porter Theodore M. Porter Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles Search for other works by this author on: T…
Genetics in the Madhouse
Digital humanism
Much history of psychology presumes a discordance between its humanistic methods and the focus on rigorous statistical reasoning that is typical of the field it studies. However, the conditions of abundant data typical of digital humanities tend to relax the constraints of tests of significance and to allow greater freedom to try out alternative interpretations within the frame of a single study. At the same time, the elusiveness of rigorous stan…
Jason D. Hansen. Mapping the Germans
Statistics, much neglected by historians since the late 1970s, is now undergoing a revival as an area of digital humanities. Since digital databases are often assembled by non-historians, it is all the more important to remember that while numbers have great value for historical study, they offer no magical release from the need to interpret. Numbers not only describe but also stimulate human actions. The resources and insights for a reflexive hi…
Edge of Objectivity
GDP
Here are two books from Princeton University Press, each providing elements of a history of the iconic number, GDP or Gross Domestic Product. (Both books treat GDP and GNP as interchangeable for their purposes). Both authors presume that the question of its adequacy as a measure is hard to separate from its role as a political and economic force. Neither, however, enters deeply into the characteristics of numbers, rankings, or indicators that giv…
Charles Coulston Gillispie (1918-2015)
Quantification in the History of the Social Sciences
The curious case of blending inheritance
Funny Numbers
The struggle over cure rate measures in nineteenth-century asylums provides an exemplary instance of how, when used for official assessments of institutions, these numbers become sites of contestation. The evasion of goals and corruption of measures tends to make these numbers 'funny' in the sense of becoming dishonest, while the mismatch between boring, technical appearances and cunning backstage manipulations supplies dark humor. The dangers ar…
Irrenärzte aller Länder! Tabular Unity and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle to Comprehend Insanity
Die Anstaltsmedizin, das erste medizinische Fachgebiet, war wahrscheinlich auch der Bereich der Medizin, der als erster statistisch erfasst wurde. Bereits im frühen 19. Jahrhundert nutzen Irrenärzte Statistiken, die hohe Heilungsraten auswiesen, um für ihre Anstalten zu werben. Als sich jedoch die Institutionen füllten und die Heilungsraten nach unten gingen, wurden, vor allem von Frankreich ausgehend, Versuche zur internationalen Harmonisierung …
Amy Levy's Fate
The narrative trajectory of this biography begins and ends with the suicide of the writer Amy Levy at the age of 27 on 9 September 1889. That tragic end gives direction to Christine Pullen's wide-ranging study of Levy and her work, while haunting it. Self-destruction is a famously elusive quarry, not just for friends and family, but also for biographers. Emile Durkheim's sociological investigation, still well-known to scholars, is the thin tip of…
Thin Description
Since the time of the French Revolution, a sequence of modern thinkers has theorized the thinning of the world in relation to the growth of science. In a large, diverse, and politicized world, subtlety seems to recede into nooks and corners, while information is revered for its ready accessibility and seeming solidity. The sciences, adapting their public voice and some of their inward practices to such expectations, have over the twentieth centur…
The Curious Case of Academic Reviewing
through on her book's suggestion of ironical distancing, but examines in earnest a system she knows well. Literary evocation here is subordinated to formal analysis of interview transcripts, including qualitative analysis through analytic matrices and content analysis using software that standardizes codes and checks inter coder reliability. The quantification yields tables compar ing how three disciplinary clusters, namely the humanities, histor…
La estadística y el curso de la razón pública
La estadística, en su forma matemática, jugó un papel importante en la transformación de las ciencias sociales en campos técnicos cuya aspiración de objetividad suponía que la ciencia social debía apartarse del conocimiento común y del razonar ordinario. Este ideal, que creció en el siglo XX y especialmente en las décadas alrededor de 1950, configuró de nuevo las relaciones de la ciencia (incluyendo la ciencia social) con las culturas que la nutr…
Measurement and Meritocracy
Is intelligence a fit topic for intellectual history? The creation and institutionalization of IQ (the initials have become self-sufficient, and no longer stand for “intelligence quotient”) have been a favorite topic in the history of psychology, and have even achieved some standing in social histories of class, race, and mobility, especially in the United States. The campaign to quantify intelligence tended to remove it from the domain of intell…
How Science Became Technical
Not until the twentieth century did science come to be regarded as fundamentally technical in nature. A technical field, after all, meant not just a difficult one, but one relying on concepts and vocabulary that matter only to specialists. The alternative, to identify science with an ideal of public reason, attained its peak of influence in the late nineteenth century. While the scale and applicability of science advanced enormously after 1900, s…
The Americanization of Social Science
Journal Article David Paul Haney. The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2008. Pp. xii, 283. $39.95. Get access David Paul Haney. The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2008. Pp. xii, 283. $39.95. Theodore M. Porter Theodore M. Port…
The Objective Self
the back of Objectivity, after many striking images, there is a table that maps the historical trajectory of scientific objectivity (371). Along the horizontal axis we find the three that structure the study: truth-to-nature, and judgment. The vertical axis lists persona, image, practice, and ontology. The authors, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, argue that each of the epistemic virtues prescribes a distinct kind of scientific practitioner as …
Locating the Domain of Calculation
Economic science generally takes as its model system the results of uncoerced market transactions, and the application of economic rationality to the state is often understood as an effort to make public institutions behave more like private firms. This requires the explicit formulation of calculations that entrepreneurs are presumed to make implicitly. Yet a formal system of calculation can never be the same as a set of unarticulated practices, …
Trust in Numbers
Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science
Objectivity in science has normally been defined by scholars as almost synonymous with realism. It may be advantageous to think of it instead in terms of impersonality, an ideal that would replace arbitrariness, idiosyncracy and judgment by explicit rules. Accounting is an exemplar of this aspect of objectivity. More important than the true representation of deep underlying financial identities is the maintenance of a system of rules that blocks …
Making Things Quantitative
The ArgumentQuantification is not merely a strategy for describing the social and natural worlds, but a means of reconfiguring them. It entails the imposition of new meanings and the disappearance of old ones. Often it is allied to systems of experimental or administrative control, and in fact considerable feats of human organization are generally required even to create stable, reasonably standardized measures. This essay urges that the uses of …
How Science Became Technical
Not until the twentieth century did science come to be regarded as fundamentally technical in nature. A technical field, after all, meant not just a difficult one, but one relying on concepts and vocabulary that matter only to specialists. The alternative, to identify science with an ideal of public reason, attained its peak of influence in the late nineteenth century. While the scale and applicability of science advanced enormously after 1900, s…
Is the Life of the Scientist a Scientific Unit
The biographical study of scientists, though familiar, has mostly seemed anodyne rather than profound as a tool of history of science. But it bears closely on the public role of the scientist, associated nowadays with the detachment of objectivity and with a sense of the scientific life as a fracturing of "the science" from other aspects of a career. Although this division is indeed characteristic of the modern scientific identity, historians sho…
Thin Description
Since the time of the French Revolution, a sequence of modern thinkers has theorized the thinning of the world in relation to the growth of science. In a large, diverse, and politicized world, subtlety seems to recede into nooks and corners, while information is revered for its ready accessibility and seeming solidity. The sciences, adapting their public voice and some of their inward practices to such expectations, have over the twentieth centur…
Economics and the History of Measurement
Research Article| December 01 2001 Economics and the History of Measurement Theodore M. Porter Theodore M. Porter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (2001) 33 (Suppl_1): 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-33-Suppl_1-4 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Theodore M. Porter; Economics and the History of Measurement. History of Polit…
Statistical and Social Facts from Quetelet to Durkheim
The Rules of Sociological Method is most famous for its definition of the social fact Seen in relation to previous statistical writings on topics like suicide, though, Durkheim's work appears more to limit the domain of social facts than to create one. For Quetelet, Wagner, and Morselli, if suicide or marriage varied by age, sex, religion, climate, or race, that was enough to make a statistical fact Durkeim, rejecting their positivism, refused to…
The Mathematics of Society
“Let us apply to the political and moral sciences the method founded upon observation and upon calculus, the method which has served us so well in the natural sciences.” The social sciences have known no truer follower of Laplace's dictum than Adolphe Quetelet. His mécanique sociale , later physique sociale , was conceived as the social analogue to Laplace's mecanique celeste , and embodied the results of an unswerving commitment not only to the …
Funny Numbers
The struggle over cure rate measures in nineteenth-century asylums provides an exemplary instance of how, when used for official assessments of institutions, these numbers become sites of contestation. The evasion of goals and corruption of measures tends to make these numbers 'funny' in the sense of becoming dishonest, while the mismatch between boring, technical appearances and cunning backstage manipulations supplies dark humor. The dangers ar…
Speaking Precision to Power
Theodore M. Porter Speaking Precision to Power: The Modern Political Role of Social Science THE MODERN COMPACT BETW EEN SCIENCE AND THE STATE ALLOWS FOR the flow of public money to research and an expectation that politicians will generally not meddle w ith the scientific work—on condition that the science, reciprocally, should stay clear of politics. That seems at first a harmless constraint, for w hat could be political about the formation and …
The Measure of Reality
Genetics in the Madhouse
The curious case of blending inheritance
The Americanization of Social Science
Journal Article David Paul Haney. The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2008. Pp. xii, 283. $39.95. Get access David Paul Haney. The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2008. Pp. xii, 283. $39.95. Theodore M. Porter Theodore M. Port…
The Objective Self
the back of Objectivity, after many striking images, there is a table that maps the historical trajectory of scientific objectivity (371). Along the horizontal axis we find the three that structure the study: truth-to-nature, and judgment. The vertical axis lists persona, image, practice, and ontology. The authors, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, argue that each of the epistemic virtues prescribes a distinct kind of scientific practitioner as …
Locating the Domain of Calculation
Economic science generally takes as its model system the results of uncoerced market transactions, and the application of economic rationality to the state is often understood as an effort to make public institutions behave more like private firms. This requires the explicit formulation of calculations that entrepreneurs are presumed to make implicitly. Yet a formal system of calculation can never be the same as a set of unarticulated practices, …
Accounting Made Visible
discussed in the pages of this journal, and I am afraid that the papers in Hopwood and Miller's collection give little explicit attention to social studies of science. Still, the book provides a convenient introduction to critical, historical and sociological studies of accounting, and it deserves to be noticed by anyone interested in the uses of knowledge. Most of the papers in this volume have been revised and condensed from work that first app…
Objectivity and Authority
Objectivity and Science The wisdom of the ancients still meant something to nineteenthcentury quantifiers, and they were known to express their very modern dogma in a dead language: Mundum numeri regunt. As metaphysics, numbers rule the may be timeless, but only in the nineteenth century did this empire of counting and calculating begin to extend itself over public life. Depending on the ideology and temperament of the interpreter, this quantific…
New historical and philosophical perspectives on quantitative genetics
Introduction
Charles Coulston Gillispie (1918-2015)
Measurement and Meritocracy
Is intelligence a fit topic for intellectual history? The creation and institutionalization of IQ (the initials have become self-sufficient, and no longer stand for “intelligence quotient”) have been a favorite topic in the history of psychology, and have even achieved some standing in social histories of class, race, and mobility, especially in the United States. The campaign to quantify intelligence tended to remove it from the domain of intell…
Social Science in the Crucible
Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918-1941. By Mark C. Smith. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994 and Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. By Theodore M. Porter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995 Get access John S. Gilkeson, Jr. John S. Gilkeson, Jr. Arizona State University West, Phoenix, Arizona Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academi…
Chance Subdued by Science
The Mathematics of Society
“Let us apply to the political and moral sciences the method founded upon observation and upon calculus, the method which has served us so well in the natural sciences.” The social sciences have known no truer follower of Laplace's dictum than Adolphe Quetelet. His mécanique sociale , later physique sociale , was conceived as the social analogue to Laplace's mecanique celeste , and embodied the results of an unswerving commitment not only to the …
The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900
The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science
Who's Who in Economics
The Search for a Methodology of Social Science
The History of Statistics
The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900
The Empire of Chance
The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes …
The American Census
L'économiste, la science, et la pouvoir
Government and Expertise
The Politics of Numbers. William Alonso , Paul Starr
Histoire du calcul économique en France. François Etner
The Uses of Humanistic History
Energy and Empire
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 145 There are two sections entitled “History of Heat Transfer Science” and “History of Heat Transfer Engineering,” each containing three papers on rather narrow segments of the subject. There is no very clear rationale for the distinction between science and engineering, and in any case neither is in any way a comprehensive survey of the subject. The papers are not without interest, but they seem to represent a…
Energy and Empire
Objectivity and Authority
Objectivity and Science The wisdom of the ancients still meant something to nineteenthcentury quantifiers, and they were known to express their very modern dogma in a dead language: Mundum numeri regunt. As metaphysics, numbers rule the may be timeless, but only in the nineteenth century did this empire of counting and calculating begin to extend itself over public life. Depending on the ideology and temperament of the interpreter, this quantific…
Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science
Objectivity in science has normally been defined by scholars as almost synonymous with realism. It may be advantageous to think of it instead in terms of impersonality, an ideal that would replace arbitrariness, idiosyncracy and judgment by explicit rules. Accounting is an exemplar of this aspect of objectivity. More important than the true representation of deep underlying financial identities is the maintenance of a system of rules that blocks …
Moyenne, milieu, centre
Interpreting the Triumph of Mathematical Economics
Research Article| January 01 1993 Interpreting the Triumph of Mathematical Economics Theodore M. Porter Theodore M. Porter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of Political Economy (1993) 25 (suppl_1): 54–68. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-1993-suppl_1012 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Theodore M. Porter; Interpreting the Triumph of Mathematical Economics. History of Politi…
Statistics and the Politics of Objectivity
The Postwar American University
The work under review completes a two-volume study that began with Geiger's To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940 (1986). While the American research university was shaped in important ways by European models, it nevertheless must be counted among the most powerful and distinctive institutions in contemporary American life. As surveys of its history these books have no real rival, and they deserve wide atte…
Chance Subdued by Science
Making Things Quantitative
The ArgumentQuantification is not merely a strategy for describing the social and natural worlds, but a means of reconfiguring them. It entails the imposition of new meanings and the disappearance of old ones. Often it is allied to systems of experimental or administrative control, and in fact considerable feats of human organization are generally required even to create stable, reasonably standardized measures. This essay urges that the uses of …
The Values of Precision
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