About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press

ISBN-100226675262

ISBN-139780226675268

eBay Product ID (ePID)98658

Product Key Features

Number of Pages436 Pages

Publication NameHistory of the Modern Fact : Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society

LanguageEnglish

SubjectHistory, Statistics, Arithmetic

Publication Year1998

TypeTextbook

AuthorMary Poovey

Subject AreaMathematics, Social Science, Science

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.1 in

Item Weight26.5 Oz

Item Length0.9 in

Item Width0.6 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

LCCN98-005155

TitleLeadingA

IllustratedYes

Table Of ContentAcknowledgments Introduction 1: The Modern Fact, the Problem of Induction, and Questions of Method 2: Accommodating Merchants: Double-Entry Bookkeeping, Mercantile Expertise, and the Effect of Accuracy 3: The Political Anatomy of the Economy: English Science and Irish Land 4: Experimental Moral Philosophy and the Problems of Liberal Governmentality 5: From Conjectural History to Political Economy 6: Reconfiguring Facts and Theory: Vestiges of Providentialism in the New Science of Wealth 7: Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech: The Problem of Induction in the 1830s Notes Bibliography Index

SynopsisHow 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. Illuminating the epistemological conditions that have made modern social and economic knowledge possible, A History of the Modern Fact provides important contributions to the history of political thought, economics, science, and philosophy, as well as to literary and cultural criticism.

LC Classification NumberHA29.P639 1998