A history of the modern fact : problems of knowledge in the sciences of wealth and society
How did the fact become modernity's most favored unit of knowledge? How did description come to seem separable from theory in the precursors of economics and the social sciences? Mary Poovey explores these questions in A History of the Modern Fact, ranging across an astonishing array of texts and ideas from the publication of the first British manual on double-entry bookkeeping in 1588 to the institutionalization of statistics in the 1830s. She shows how the production of systematic knowledge from descriptions of observed particulars influenced government, how numerical representation became the privileged vehicle for generating useful facts, and how belief--whether figured as credit, credibility, or credulity--remained essential to the production of knowledge
History
xxv, 419 pages ; 24 cm
9780226675251, 9780226675268, 9780226675183, 0226675254, 0226675262, 0226675181
38270584
The modern fact, the problem of induction, and questions of method
Accommodating merchants: double-entry bookkeeping, mercantile expertise, and the effect of accuracy
The political anatomy of the economy: English science and Irish land
Experimental moral philosophy and the problems of liberal governmentality
From conjectural history to political economy
Reconfiguring facts and theory: vestiges of providentialism in the new science of wealth
Figures of arithmetic, figures of speech: the problem of induction in the 1830s
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