This chapter assesses the bearing of bureaucratic cultures on science, then shows how inferential statistics became standard in medicine and psychology as a response to internal disciplinary weakness and external regulatory pressures. The massive effort to introduce quantitative criteria for public decisions in the 1960s and 1970s was not simply an unmediated response to a new political climate. It reflected also the overwhelming success of quantification in the social, behavioral, and medical sciences during the postwar period. This was not a chance confluence of independent lines of cultural and intellectual development, but in some way a single phenomenon. It is no accident that the move toward the almost universal quantification of social and applied disciplines was led by the United States, and succeeded most fully there. The push for rigor in the disciplines derived in part from the same distrust of unarticulated expert knowledge and the same suspicion of arbitrariness and discretion that shaped political culture so profoundly in the same period. Some of this suspicion came from within the disciplines it affected, but in every case it was at least reinforced by vulnerability to the suspicions of outsiders, often expressed in an explicitly political arena.
{"title":"Objectivity and the Politics of Disciplines","authors":"T. Porter","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.14","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter assesses the bearing of bureaucratic cultures on science, then shows how inferential statistics became standard in medicine and psychology as a response to internal disciplinary weakness and external regulatory pressures. The massive effort to introduce quantitative criteria for public decisions in the 1960s and 1970s was not simply an unmediated response to a new political climate. It reflected also the overwhelming success of quantification in the social, behavioral, and medical sciences during the postwar period. This was not a chance confluence of independent lines of cultural and intellectual development, but in some way a single phenomenon. It is no accident that the move toward the almost universal quantification of social and applied disciplines was led by the United States, and succeeded most fully there. The push for rigor in the disciplines derived in part from the same distrust of unarticulated expert knowledge and the same suspicion of arbitrariness and discretion that shaped political culture so profoundly in the same period. Some of this suspicion came from within the disciplines it affected, but in every case it was at least reinforced by vulnerability to the suspicions of outsiders, often expressed in an explicitly political arena.","PeriodicalId":178798,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Numbers","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127940282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Experts against Objectivity:","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.11","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":178798,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Numbers","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133087023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter traces the history of cost–benefit analysis in the United States bureaucracy from the 1920s until about 1960. It is not a story of academic research, but of political pressure and administrative conflict. Cost–benefit methods were introduced to promote procedural regularity and to give public evidence of fairness in the selection of water projects. Early in the century, numbers produced by the Army Corps of Engineers were usually accepted on its authority alone, and there was correspondingly little need for standardization of methods. About 1940, however, economic numbers became objects of bitter controversy, as the Corps was challenged by such powerful interests as utility companies and railroads. The really crucial development in this story was the outbreak of intense bureaucratic conflict between the Corps and other government agencies, especially the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Reclamation. The agencies tried to settle their feuds by harmonizing their economic analyses. When negotiation failed as a strategy for achieving uniformity, they were compelled to try to ground their makeshift techniques in economic rationality. On this account, cost–benefit analysis had to be transformed from a collection of local bureaucratic practices into a set of rationalized economic principles.
{"title":"U.S. Army Engineers and the Rise of Cost-Benefit Analysis","authors":"T. Porter","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.13","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter traces the history of cost–benefit analysis in the United States bureaucracy from the 1920s until about 1960. It is not a story of academic research, but of political pressure and administrative conflict. Cost–benefit methods were introduced to promote procedural regularity and to give public evidence of fairness in the selection of water projects. Early in the century, numbers produced by the Army Corps of Engineers were usually accepted on its authority alone, and there was correspondingly little need for standardization of methods. About 1940, however, economic numbers became objects of bitter controversy, as the Corps was challenged by such powerful interests as utility companies and railroads. The really crucial development in this story was the outbreak of intense bureaucratic conflict between the Corps and other government agencies, especially the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Reclamation. The agencies tried to settle their feuds by harmonizing their economic analyses. When negotiation failed as a strategy for achieving uniformity, they were compelled to try to ground their makeshift techniques in economic rationality. On this account, cost–benefit analysis had to be transformed from a collection of local bureaucratic practices into a set of rationalized economic principles.","PeriodicalId":178798,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Numbers","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115269098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter explains that, as with the methods of natural science, the quantitative technologies used to investigate social and economic life work best if the world they aim to describe can be remade in their image. Numbers alone never provide enough information to make detailed decisions about the operation of a company. Their highest purpose is to instill an ethic. Measures of profitability — measures of achievement in general — succeed to the degree they become “technologies of the soul.” They provide legitimacy for administrative actions, in large part because they provide standards against which people judge themselves. Grades in school, scores on standardized examinations, and the bottom line on an accounting sheet cannot work effectively unless their validity, or at least reasonableness, is accepted by the people whose accomplishments or worth they purport to measure. When it is, the measures succeed by giving direction to the very activities that are being measured. In this way, individuals are made governable; they display what Foucault called governmentality. Numbers create and can be compared with norms, which are among the gentlest and yet most pervasive forms of power in modern democracies.
{"title":"How Social Numbers Are Made Valid","authors":"T. Porter","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.8","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explains that, as with the methods of natural science, the quantitative technologies used to investigate social and economic life work best if the world they aim to describe can be remade in their image. Numbers alone never provide enough information to make detailed decisions about the operation of a company. Their highest purpose is to instill an ethic. Measures of profitability — measures of achievement in general — succeed to the degree they become “technologies of the soul.” They provide legitimacy for administrative actions, in large part because they provide standards against which people judge themselves. Grades in school, scores on standardized examinations, and the bottom line on an accounting sheet cannot work effectively unless their validity, or at least reasonableness, is accepted by the people whose accomplishments or worth they purport to measure. When it is, the measures succeed by giving direction to the very activities that are being measured. In this way, individuals are made governable; they display what Foucault called governmentality. Numbers create and can be compared with norms, which are among the gentlest and yet most pervasive forms of power in modern democracies.","PeriodicalId":178798,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Numbers","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114422863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter discusses how measurement activities were central in forming some of the most basic ideas of the physical sciences. It should be observed that this infatuation with measuring led to the neutralization of concepts as well as their creation. Temperature had less human meaning after the experimental physicists laid hold of it. In the natural sciences, Ernst Mach's positivism was especially influential among experimenters. The resonance of the positivist mania for quantification with vast social ambitions for science is exemplified best of all by the career of Karl Pearson. From the early 1890s until his death more than forty years later, Pearson harnessed his prodigious talents to the development of a statistical method and its application to biological and social questions. The chapter then considers the standardization of measurements.
{"title":"A World of Artifice","authors":"T. Porter","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.7","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses how measurement activities were central in forming some of the most basic ideas of the physical sciences. It should be observed that this infatuation with measuring led to the neutralization of concepts as well as their creation. Temperature had less human meaning after the experimental physicists laid hold of it. In the natural sciences, Ernst Mach's positivism was especially influential among experimenters. The resonance of the positivist mania for quantification with vast social ambitions for science is exemplified best of all by the career of Karl Pearson. From the early 1890s until his death more than forty years later, Pearson harnessed his prodigious talents to the development of a statistical method and its application to biological and social questions. The chapter then considers the standardization of measurements.","PeriodicalId":178798,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Numbers","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134130708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Index","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.18","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":178798,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Numbers","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134201355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter examines the moral economy of scientific communities. Postwar American defenders of science posited a scientific community in order to make science self-regulating. In the event that scientific method failed to keep scientists from making errors, the community would step in to sift the good from the bad. Errors would be weeded out by reviewers or fail the test of replication and be expelled from the body of scientific knowledge. Also, the community was to judge what kind of work is worthwhile, and, with a soft touch if not an invisible hand, direct the available resources to those research areas where they would do the most good. It could do so much more effectively as a free community than would ever be possible under a centralized bureaucracy. The chapter then argues that the seemingly relentless push for objectivity and impersonality in science is not quite universal, and must be understood partly as an adaptation to institutional disunity and permeable disciplinary boundaries.
{"title":"Is Science Made by Communities?","authors":"T. Porter","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxcrz2b.15","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the moral economy of scientific communities. Postwar American defenders of science posited a scientific community in order to make science self-regulating. In the event that scientific method failed to keep scientists from making errors, the community would step in to sift the good from the bad. Errors would be weeded out by reviewers or fail the test of replication and be expelled from the body of scientific knowledge. Also, the community was to judge what kind of work is worthwhile, and, with a soft touch if not an invisible hand, direct the available resources to those research areas where they would do the most good. It could do so much more effectively as a free community than would ever be possible under a centralized bureaucracy. The chapter then argues that the seemingly relentless push for objectivity and impersonality in science is not quite universal, and must be understood partly as an adaptation to institutional disunity and permeable disciplinary boundaries.","PeriodicalId":178798,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Numbers","volume":"347 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115342643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1996-01-31DOI: 10.1515/9781400821617-010
T. Porter
{"title":"CHAPTER SEVEN. U.S. Army Engineers and the Rise of Cost-Benefit Analysis","authors":"T. Porter","doi":"10.1515/9781400821617-010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400821617-010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":178798,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Numbers","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1996-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121089256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1996-01-31DOI: 10.1515/9781400821617-006
T. Porter
{"title":"CHAPTER THREE. Economic Measurement and the Values of Science","authors":"T. Porter","doi":"10.1515/9781400821617-006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400821617-006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":178798,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Numbers","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1996-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129706054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 1996-01-31DOI: 10.1515/9781400821617-008
T. Porter
{"title":"CHAPTER FIVE. Experts against Objectivity: Accountants and Actuaries","authors":"T. Porter","doi":"10.1515/9781400821617-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400821617-008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":178798,"journal":{"name":"Trust in Numbers","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1996-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126746515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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