The taming of chance

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Ian Hacking: The taming of chance (1990, Cambridge University Press)

264 pages

English language

Published Sept. 5, 1990 by Cambridge University Press.

ISBN:
978-0-521-38014-0
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4 stars (2 reviews)

2 editions

reviewed The taming of chance by Ian Hacking (Ideas in context)

totally normal beast

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I really liked The Social Construction of What? and this sounded pretty neat. It was, but it was hard, certainly harder to follow than TSCOW. Like that book what is fun here is the teasing apart of normally bound-together strands (astronomy and measurement error, physiology and the "normal" state of organs, positivism and its social physics, etc. etc.). Hacking's historigraphic method, which is to focus mainly on exemplary but obscure 19th-century figures in European state data-collecting and their infights and grand schemes, is good for lots of laughs. And I got a clearer sense of the "state" in statistics: as Hacking memorably points out, statistics are typically collected by US about THEM: they, the workers, the poor, the peasantry, etc., need us, the enlightened administrators, to study them and assess what can and can't be done for them. This leads in one direction to the idea of the "average man" …

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Subjects

  • Chance
  • Necessity (Philosophy)