 |
GetTextbooks.co.uk
Compare Prices & Save up to 90% |
|
|
|
| Login | Sign up | My Wish List |
 | | The Taming of Chance (Ideas in Context) by Ian Hacking ISBN-10: 9780521380140 ISBN-10: 0-521-38014-6 ISBN-13: 9780521380140 ISBN-13: 978-0-521-38014-0 Hardcover 1990-10-26 Cambridge University Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description In this important new study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as his best selling 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. Combining detailed scientific historical research with characteristic philosophic breath and verve, The Taming of Chance brings out the relations among philosophy, the physical sciences, mathematics and the development of social institutions, and provides a unique and authoritative analysis of the "probabilization" of the Western world. | ||
Book Description In the course of a continuing inquiry into the origins and development of contemporary thought, this study reveals how statistical patterns were finally perceived in a non-deterministic manner by the end of the late nineteenth century. | ||
Reviews | ||
The Untamable, Taming of Chance I read this book because it's on the Modern Library's Top 100 Non-Fiction List. This book seems to go more in the direction of a historical study of statistics. There's no visible, clearly stated thesis, and while you can tell he has a point he would like to prove, he more or less just rambles on and on about the historical aspects, without making his point clear and discernible. Some of the facts and such are interesting, it shows in some ways how statistics paved the way for some types of modern day thinking, but for the most part it's boring and you wonder if you can trust anything the author claims, because he doesn't in fact differentiate his opinion from that of the sources he's quoting. In the end it's all just a hodge podge of facts thrown together with no logical connection, and he can't be taken seriously as either a philosopher, or a statician, only as someone who is intellectual in the sense that they know a lot of history and facts (even that is to give him a little too much credit). I would instead recommend a more non-biased book on statistics, or to actually just read some of the works of the philosophers he mentions: Kant, Nietzsche, Hume, Aristotle, Etc. | ||
A fascinating chapter in the 'history of the present'. This is a fascinating book, which charts the gradual development of statistical ideas in the nineteenth century, along with associated concepts, such as normalcy, chance, and determinism. However, a few criticisms are in order. Hacking reports that there was a certain conceptual incoherence surrounding ideas relating to statistics in the 19th century, especially concerning ideas relating to determinism and chance. But I'm not quite sure that Hacking has been able to find the thread out of this confusion, as some confusions appear to remain rather resistant in spite of the narrative, which in general is admiringly clear. Three points will serve as examples: Eastern and Western: Hacking describes two broad classes of reaction to the development of statistical reasoning; 'Western' (U.K. and France) and 'Eastern' (centred on what was then Prussia) approaches. Western thought, which was largely open to statistical reasoning, is described by Hacking as 'atomistic, individualistic, and liberal'. Eastern thought on the other hand was 'holistic, collectivist, and conservative', and critical of the developing trends of statistics. Geographical and political issues aside, this characterization almost at once falls apart. For instance, slightly later in the book we are told that statistical methods were resisted in (French) medicine, as medicine was concerned with the individual case, not the average or normal, and hence statistical data was of no use. Immediately after reporting this, Hacking queries, without irony, 'how then could there be a use of statistics in human affairs? In the very institution designed to strip away the individuality of man, namely the court of law'. To add to the confusion, we later find out that Engel, the Prussian apparatchik, and hence 'Eastern' thinker, considered statistical reasoning to be part of a certain mentality he wished to avoid, that of determinism, which denies individual freedom. Likewise, the economist Wagner, Hacking reports, also adhered to this view. In fact there appears to have been a general resistance to statistical methods in the 'East' precisely because the so-called individualistic methods of the statisticians were seen as a threat to the concept of human freedom and individuality. Durkheim, the French sociologist, whom we are at one point told was 'immersed' in the Western mentality, nevertheless ascribed the functioning of statistical laws to 'collective tendencies', in fact to 'social forces', rather than to the 'underlying little independent causes' of Quetelet, the French pioneer of statistical methodology. No doubt there was some sort of difference at play here between East and West, but it strikes me that trying to distinguish these two cultures by calling one individualistic and the other collectivist does little to help. The Title of the book: 'The Taming of Chance', especially if one recalls the title of Hacking's earlier book, 'The Emergence of Probability' which dealt with the preceding era, leads one to think that there are two parts to the development of the ideas mentioned in the book - initially, the emergence of ideas relating to chance and probability, and later their gradual 'taming'. But that would be a mistake. Hacking makes it quite clear that probabilistic and statistical laws were not initially seen to be in conflict with necessity or determinism. Hume, and other enlightenment thinkers, regarded chance as unreal, as merely an illusion caused by lack of knowledge. There was simply no chance around to be tamed, before the nineteenth century. It would appear instead that chance and its 'taming' emerged at the same time - the book then might have been more aptly titled 'The Emergence of Chance'. The idea of 'taming' seems to have slipped in from one of the book's sub-themes, the idea that statistical methods led to greater institutional control of human affairs, or from a certain conception of causality that I shall mention below. Multiple causality, or causal sets: Quetelet, the French astronomer turned statistician, proposed a theory of 'little independent causes' to explain statistical regularity. The causes of individual cases of, say, suicide, or coin tosses, work independently of each other, but taken as a group, over all cases, they total up in a way predictable by probabilities. As far as Hacking is concerned this explanation 'does not hang together'. Be that as it may, it strikes me that there is an important aspect of Quetelet's purported explanation that deserves attention, and that is the idea that causes are best understood as existing in sets or groups. This idea is reinforced by similar attempts to explain the workings of statistical regularity later mentioned in the book - the holism of Boutroux and Durkheim, as well as the ideas of Peirce and Nietzsche. The latter two, for instance, tried to accommodate probability within causality by claiming that while causality itself may act in a determinate manner, the existence of specific causal laws themselves are a matter of chance. This explanation is not meaningful, it seems to me, unless one brings a prior notion of possibility to play in the existence of particular causal laws - not simply their actuality - as is done with the contemporary notion of possible worlds. To say that laws p, q, and r are possible in certain situations, but only p is actual in this case, is to use the idea of sets or classes of laws which are compossible with certain situations. There is certainly an ambiguity in the concept of chance; there are at least two ideas involved: chance as opposed to causality, as pure chaos; and chance in consort with causality, 'tamed' chance, so-to-speak, chance that can '[bring] order out of chaos', chance that can support 'laws of chance' (quoted from the book's chapter summaries). Perhaps the idea of causal sets can bring some clarity to a familiar but nevertheless obscure concept, and to help to distinguish between different kinds of indeterminism that are often conflated. | ||
Probable cause to read Some works of non-fiction manage to be engaging throughout. Others, like the Taming of Chance, are important but can be tough to read through much of the text. Hacking takes on the history of probability; which he describes as "the philosophical success story of the first half of the 20th century." The taming of chance refers to the way apparently irregular events have been brought under the control of natural or social law. Hacking takes us through the 19th century intellectual battle between adherents of determinism and probability's champions. The book devolves at times into more of a history of thought than a discussion of the implications of these changes in thinking. In fact, the author admits late in the book, "My chapters have become successively more removed from daily affairs." He describes chance first as a concept that had no place in reasonable discourse during the Enlightenment. With the development of measures of probability around 1830, chance is condemned by "statistical fatalism" to irrelevance. Finally, with the development of quantum mechanics in 1930, chance becomes the critical element of life with which we are all too familiar. Along the way, we learn that some proponents of probability helped create the idea that free will existed only in theory (from 1830 until 1930). Thus, criminals are behaving predictably and the degree of their personal responsibility is at issue. Hacking concludes, "we have not made our peace with statistical laws about people. They jostle far too roughly with our ideas about personal responsibility." While I would not consider this book as light summer reading, it will reveal to the determined reader changes in historical thought with which he is not likely to be previously familiar. | ||
not for everyone, maybe but a mind-opener for those who are ready, an awesomely rewarding book for those who are willing to make the extra effort | ||
Why bother? If, somewhere, deep within the tortured bowels of this book, there is a central thesis that could be stated in a few short sentences and comprehended by most educated English-speaking peoples, I have yet to find it. Endless restatement, obfuscated in painfully cultivated strings of verbiage, of trivial fact is used to document an hypothesis that if stated clearly could be supported or refuted in about a page-and-a-half and then likely consigned to the graveyard of such endeavor. The prose is a true caricature of Derrida's; the logic is a laTour de force. Typical of such works, the author begins with a premise and then selectivley seeks textual support. Of course, such an approach can be conveniently utilized to support any premise and if written with sufficient opacity will pass for scholarship and great insight. The book is an unreadable bloody bore; its value is restricted to its caloric content relative to the market price of a barrel of Texas sweet. | ||