The Taming of Chance

This book combines detailed scientific historical research with characteristic philosophic breadth and verve.

Ian Hacking (Author)

9780521380140, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 October 1990

284 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.7 cm, 0.534 kg

"The Taming of Chance contains a wealth of information and is very pleasant reading. The various pursuits that impinge on the taming of chance and the development of statistical law are overwhelming. I recommend this book strongly to anyone interested in the development of statistical thought." Peter Guttorp, Journal of the American Statistical Association

In this important study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as the best-selling The Emergence of Probability. Professor Hacking shows how by the late-nineteenth century it became possible to think of statistical patterns as explanatory in themselves, and to regard the world as not necessarily deterministic in character. In the same period the idea of human nature was displaced by a model of normal people with laws of dispersion. These two parallel transformations fed into each other, so that chance made the world seem less capricious: it was legitimated because it brought order out of chaos. Combining detailed scientific historical research with characteristic philosophic breadth and verve, The Taming of Chance brings out the relations between philosophy, the physical sciences, mathematics and the development of social institutions, and provides a unique and authoritative analysis of the 'probabilisation' of the western world.

Acknowledgements
1. The argument
2. The doctrine of necessity
3. Public amateurs, secret bureaucrats
4. Bureaux
5. The sweet despotism of reason
6. The quantum of sickness
7. The granary of science
8. Suicide is a kind of madness
9. The experimental basis of the philosophy of legislation
10. Facts without authenticity, without detail, without control, and without value
11. By what majority?
12. The law of large numbers
13. Regimental chests
14. Society prepares the crimes
15. The astronomical conception of society
16. The mineralogical conception of society
17. The most ancient nobility
18. Cassirer's thesis
19. The normal state
20. As real as cosmic forces
21. The autonomy of statistical law
22. A chapter from Prussian statistics
23. A universe of chance
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]