Lost Causes: Walter Scott and Adolphe Quetelet's Revolutions (original) (raw)
Related papers
Learning from the "Probabilistic Revolution” History. Alain Desrosières’s French school
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2016
In this chapter, Fabrice Bardet, a long-life student of Alain Desrosières tells the amazing academic dynamic that Alain Desrosières created around him. From the 1990s to his death in 2013, he was, without any doubt, the French scholar situated in the center of the sociological field dedicated to quantification's processes. Fabrice first comes back on the history of his master, a story that he had been told several times, by his side. Then he tells the story of the influence of his master on several generations of scholars, in France and abroad. He insists, among other things, on the importance that Alain Desrosières gave, from his main book published in 1993, The Politics of Numbers, to his most recent publications, to the influence of the writing of The Probabilistic Revolution, in the 1980s, in an international context, set up in Bielefeld, Germany. From this perspective, he explains how, in his own view, this focus made by Desrosières participated in creating a French school for sociology of quantification.
European Romantic Review, 2015 Vol. 26, No. 3, 301–314, 2015
This article approaches the problem of organizing Romanticism and, with it, the nineteenth century by way of exploring a new type of ontological thinking, introduced by the Romantics, specifically Hölderlin, and designated here as “Romantic ontology.” This ontology is defined by the impossibility of capturing the ultimate workings of the world by any given concept, which only allows us an access to certain effects of these ultimate workings. The radical limitations thus established do not inhibit but instead help to advance thought and knowledge and make them succeed where they failed previously, including in developing a better understanding of Romantic and nineteenth-century literature and culture. The nature of thought and knowledge changes, however: the unthinkable and the unknowable are now irreducible at any stage of our thinking and knowledge. As a result, we are irreducibly deprived of certainty, and the recourse to probability becomes an unavoidable aspect of our thinking and knowledge. Accordingly, we can only estimate and argue for the probability of our historical and theoretical claims, for example, those concerning how Romanticism and the nineteenth century were organized by a given figure or community at the time, or how they could be organized by us. This, however, is thought and knowledge, too, and they may be the best we can have.
1987
Despite the controversy that often surrounds scientific revolutions, such as the Copernican revolution in astronomy or the Freudian revolution in psychology, one usually finds a general consensus among historians about certain basic issues concerning them; there is rarely any dispute about the principal individuals involved, or the specific discipline undergoing change, or the relevant period of time during which that change took place. None of these hold true, however, of the so-called probabilistic revolution that is the subject of this two-volume collection of papers: this is a proposed revolution that is difficult to attribute to any one group of individuals, affected a wide range of fields rather than just one, and took the better part of a century before it was in place. Often an important aspect of a scientific revolution is its impact on the way we view the world. Such far-reaching shifts often have far humbler origins: they are the natural if unintended result of major theoretical changes within a science, adopted initially because they provide new ways of dealing with old problems. The impact of Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton on the thought of their time was profound, but they were largely motivated by specific technical questions of a much more limited character. What is perhaps unique about the probabilistic revolution, however, is that the methodological changes one observes appear to be not so much the cause as the result of external changes in scientific philosophy. The rise of quantitative genetics provides a striking example. The story of how Gregor Mendel's paper of 1866 was ignored until 1900, when it was simultaneously rediscovered by Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak, is too familiar to require recounting here.' Viewed in isolation, Mendel's story seems a mere curiosity. On reflection, however, it is tempting to interpret the initial neglect of Mendel's work, coupled with its subsequent rediscovery, as symptomatic of a much more basic change that was taking place beneath the surface; as a shift in perspective that had taken place in biology, a change from old ways of thought in which Mendel's approach was not even thinkable, to a new way of thinking in which it became natural and inevitable.2 This was after all the period that saw the birth of the English school of biometrics; the work of that eccentric Victorian genius Francis Galton; the founding of the journal Biometrika; and also such developments as Alphonse Bertillon's method of criminal identification by numerical meas~rements.~ This change was not limited to the biological sciences; similar transformations also
The two paths of the mathematization of the social and economic sciences
Physis-Firenze, 1993
We seek no lessons from the history of nations or of mankind's blunderings, which represent for us only an abyss of disorder.» (François Quesnay) «History depicts human heart: it is in history that we must look for the advantages and the drawbacks of the different legislations.» (Napoléon Bonaparte) SUMMARY -The aim of this paper is to show that two ways were open for the mathematization of social and economic sciences at the end of the Eighteenth Century. The first way was to follow the tradition of the arithmétique politique which was conveyed by Condorcet in the programme of the mathématique sociale: in this approach the calculus of probability had a central role. The other way was to imitate more strictly the analytical-deterministic approach and the mathematical methods of mathematical physics and mechanics. We emphasize here the strong paradigmatic aspects which led to the final success of the second approach and we provide the historical elements explaining this development. We describe also the decline of the tradition of the arithmétique politique and the causes of this decline. A special attention is devoted to the work of the last arithméticien politicien, E.-E. Duvillard de Durand. The Appendix provides a detailed biography of Duvillard and other unpublished materials.
Educational Studies in Mathematics
In this article, I present the eighteenth century’s polemic of Bernoulli and d’Alembert concerning the smallpox epidemic and a prevention method called inoculation. Through an analysis of the polemic and the related resources, I show that this historical debate has various interests for mathematics education; and more specifically it can help teachers to confront dilemmas emerging with the COVID-19 pandemic (for example if a teacher should talk about it in class or not, how to help students to interpret the statistical data and the mathematical models connected to the pandemic and more generally, how to deal with the confusions and concerns emerging in connection to the pandemic). I describe the documents related to the historical polemic as transitional objects, having a potential to reveal the teachers’ own professional or personal experiences, reflections and questions, and to stimulate dialogue with them on these issues. I illustrate this proposition by the presentation of an on...