The Empire of Chance
The Empire of Chance
Zeno Swijtink, State University of New York, Buffalo
Theodore Porter, University of Virginia
Lorraine Daston, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
John Beatty, University of Minnesota
Lorenz Kruger, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
$35.00
USDThe 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 recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but in dramatically different disciplinary and historical contexts. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centres on how these technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society. Written by an interdisciplinary team of historians and philosophers, this readable, lucid account keeps technical material to an absolute minimum. It is aimed not only at specialists in the history and philosophy of science, but also at the general reader and scholars in other disciplines.
Reviews & endorsements
"...will be useful to statisticians, philosophers, scientists and other historians of science who want to understand the roots of the probability-based statistical methods we use so widely today...The Empire of Chance is a valuable book." Science
"In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probablilty and statistics, this book focuses on how technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind, and society. The work is aimed at historians of science and philosophers of science, but it is also directed toward scholars in other disciplines and therefore technical material is kept to a minimum." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Product details
October 1990Paperback
9780521398381
360 pages
229 × 153 × 30 mm
0.56kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Classical probabilities, 1660–1840
- 2. Statistical probabilities, 1820–1900
- 3. The inference experts
- 4. Chance and life: controversies in modern biology
- 5. The probabilistic revolution in physics
- 6. Statistics of the mind
- 7. Numbers rule the world
- 8. The implications of chance
- References
- Name index
- Subject index.
