by From Asad Zaman This continues from the previous post on the Downfall of Rhetoric in 20th Century Even though our goal is to explain how apparently objective looking statistics conceal arbitrary and subjective judgments, the path we take requires a detour through “epistemology”, or the theory of knowledge. Instead of the deep discussion provided by Putnam (2002, Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy), we will take a shortcut, and look at how these philosophical debates and controversies about have shaped the way that social sciences in general, and statistics in particular, have conceived of the relationship between the numbers we analyzed and the real world that generates these numbers. The wide gap between the philosophers and other intellectuals can be seen clearly in their
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from Asad Zaman
This continues from the previous post on the Downfall of Rhetoric in 20th Century
Even though our goal is to explain how apparently objective looking statistics conceal arbitrary and subjective judgments, the path we take requires a detour through “epistemology”, or the theory of knowledge. Instead of the deep discussion provided by Putnam (2002, Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy), we will take a shortcut, and look at how these philosophical debates and controversies about have shaped the way that social sciences in general, and statistics in particular, have conceived of the relationship between the numbers we analyzed and the real world that generates these numbers. The wide gap between the philosophers and other intellectuals can be seen clearly in their respective views regarding logical positivism. One of the lifetime advocates of logical positivism, A.J. Ayer, eventually came to the realization that “it was all wrong”. Another sympathizer and proponent, Bas Von Fraasen, opens his book “The Scientific Image” by saying that this philosophy had a “spectacular crash”: read more