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Ideas in Context
The Taming Of Chance
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.
284 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
About the author
Ian Hacking
58 books129 followersIan Hacking is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, specialised in the History of Science.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
November 23, 2020
This book often veers close to opening up whole new vistas in the history of thought. Occasionally it even approaches the goal it strives for, which is to show how the statistical consideration of human beings, specifically, the numbering of them as biological creatures with predictable amounts of death, disease, madness, suicide, and crime, led to a vision of a fundamentally indeterminate universe based not on concrete causes but by irreducible chance. But then, often at the moment such a vision is glimpsed, the book descends into non sequitors and indecipherable mummeries.
The basic idea is that before the 19th century, there was precious little data on which to speculate about human beings. It was only with John Sinclair and the British Board of Agriculture in 1792, and Krug and the Prussian Statistical Bureau after 1807, William Farr and the Registrar General of England after 1837, that governments began compiling regular data on basic things like births and deaths of their population. By the 1820s, governments began releasing more data on things like suicide, and it didn't take long before doctors (like Broussais, the leeches advocate and progenitor of phrenology) and social scientists noticed that these seeming individual events and choices had shocking amounts of regularities. However, unlike the physical data which formed earlier conceptions of causality and statistics, and which seemed to point to enduring causes and effects in nature, it was hard to reduce these social data to a precise formula. Eventually, it took people like Adolphe Quetelet, the Belgian Royal Astronomer who earlier studied the varying estimates of the stars, to postulate "l'homme moyen," the average man, and that men in general followed a curve like the one that Laplace speculated existed for physical occurrences, and for later people like C.S. Pierce, the US Coastal Survey official, who also moved from stars to humans, to speculate that almost all causes, physical and social, were based on chance, and could not be predicted with certainty ever. Earlier studies which had pointed out the variability of human observations of supposedly concrete and real events, eventually came to be interpreted as demonstrating the inherently subjective and probabilistic nature of all truth.
The individuals here are often portrayed only by their last name and without background, and their stories are mixed up with discussions of contemporary scholarship on them. The book left me wanting to know more about the connections between statistics, sociology, and philosophy in the 19th century, but also continuously frustrated by the author's inability to tell a concrete story. It's probable that I absorbed no more than 10% of the book.
The basic idea is that before the 19th century, there was precious little data on which to speculate about human beings. It was only with John Sinclair and the British Board of Agriculture in 1792, and Krug and the Prussian Statistical Bureau after 1807, William Farr and the Registrar General of England after 1837, that governments began compiling regular data on basic things like births and deaths of their population. By the 1820s, governments began releasing more data on things like suicide, and it didn't take long before doctors (like Broussais, the leeches advocate and progenitor of phrenology) and social scientists noticed that these seeming individual events and choices had shocking amounts of regularities. However, unlike the physical data which formed earlier conceptions of causality and statistics, and which seemed to point to enduring causes and effects in nature, it was hard to reduce these social data to a precise formula. Eventually, it took people like Adolphe Quetelet, the Belgian Royal Astronomer who earlier studied the varying estimates of the stars, to postulate "l'homme moyen," the average man, and that men in general followed a curve like the one that Laplace speculated existed for physical occurrences, and for later people like C.S. Pierce, the US Coastal Survey official, who also moved from stars to humans, to speculate that almost all causes, physical and social, were based on chance, and could not be predicted with certainty ever. Earlier studies which had pointed out the variability of human observations of supposedly concrete and real events, eventually came to be interpreted as demonstrating the inherently subjective and probabilistic nature of all truth.
The individuals here are often portrayed only by their last name and without background, and their stories are mixed up with discussions of contemporary scholarship on them. The book left me wanting to know more about the connections between statistics, sociology, and philosophy in the 19th century, but also continuously frustrated by the author's inability to tell a concrete story. It's probable that I absorbed no more than 10% of the book.
January 14, 2024
Important piece of The Puzzle. Wish the last chapter on Peirce was longer but maybe I should just reread it.
December 4, 2013
This is only a piece of a much more substantial review that I hope someday to write(with all the notes in my copies margins, that may only consist of extracting some of the more cohesive thoughts that reside there). In the mean time, I assure you that if you want to understand the ways in which probability began to be applied to any number of actual events, this is a fascinating book for you.
I admit that I enjoyed the 'emergence of probability' a bit more(by the same author on the moving from notions of what is probable in the sense or approved of by those that you would entrust with decision making power and the ideas of signs to something more like the notion of randomness that we think of today(though not quite the same given that he didn't really touch on Kolmogorov or really much other than leading into the years in which this book picks up)...I could go on but that's for another review and another day).
Most fascinating is his development of the concept of normality and pathological/deviant, as it builds first in geometry, then medicine and slowly percolates throughout our conception of what it means to be human. The penultimate point of arrival is the use of statistical law as a means of first analyzing and describing what it means to be human(the beginning of governmental statistical offices), then diagnosing (in terms of claims regarding the health of either the body and of society), and (to a lesser extent) intervening on the normal state(in his words acting as an objective bridge allowing the neutral transmission between claims of is and ought).
The chapter that most ring in my ears(admittedly it's been a while since I'd finished it and these were what I'd read most recently) were the chapters on normality and its place in medicine and law. Some gems in particular were 1) discussions of how even after laws of probability had been established, even the Poisson (who, to speak blithely, invented the law of large numbers) of the possibility of the use of statistics in medicine as medicine was about individuals, whereas randomness was of populations(which was said in response to a quite successful demonstration to the contrary regarding the use of a particular surgical technique) and 2) the role of a priorism in guiding reasoning about what makes for a good jury size and the assumptions that went into their arguments and the consequences thereof.
Hacking is one of my favorite thinkers and his exceptional taste in picking and weaving together various historical examples to make larger philosophical points are the reasons why I cannot hesitate to recommend the book. With a single caveat. Don't read this before you read the emergence of probability. While he doesn't list it as a prerequisite for this, the yarns he spins travel deep through his work, and you could miss a lot if you don't know what to be looking for.
I admit that I enjoyed the 'emergence of probability' a bit more(by the same author on the moving from notions of what is probable in the sense or approved of by those that you would entrust with decision making power and the ideas of signs to something more like the notion of randomness that we think of today(though not quite the same given that he didn't really touch on Kolmogorov or really much other than leading into the years in which this book picks up)...I could go on but that's for another review and another day).
Most fascinating is his development of the concept of normality and pathological/deviant, as it builds first in geometry, then medicine and slowly percolates throughout our conception of what it means to be human. The penultimate point of arrival is the use of statistical law as a means of first analyzing and describing what it means to be human(the beginning of governmental statistical offices), then diagnosing (in terms of claims regarding the health of either the body and of society), and (to a lesser extent) intervening on the normal state(in his words acting as an objective bridge allowing the neutral transmission between claims of is and ought).
The chapter that most ring in my ears(admittedly it's been a while since I'd finished it and these were what I'd read most recently) were the chapters on normality and its place in medicine and law. Some gems in particular were 1) discussions of how even after laws of probability had been established, even the Poisson (who, to speak blithely, invented the law of large numbers) of the possibility of the use of statistics in medicine as medicine was about individuals, whereas randomness was of populations(which was said in response to a quite successful demonstration to the contrary regarding the use of a particular surgical technique) and 2) the role of a priorism in guiding reasoning about what makes for a good jury size and the assumptions that went into their arguments and the consequences thereof.
Hacking is one of my favorite thinkers and his exceptional taste in picking and weaving together various historical examples to make larger philosophical points are the reasons why I cannot hesitate to recommend the book. With a single caveat. Don't read this before you read the emergence of probability. While he doesn't list it as a prerequisite for this, the yarns he spins travel deep through his work, and you could miss a lot if you don't know what to be looking for.
January 16, 2019
Uma história dos desenvolvimentos da estatística no século XVIII e seus malefícios na lógica de todas as sociedades que a sobreconsomem. Fala das grandes teorias como a teoria dos números grandes de Poisson, discute argumentos de Venn, a institucionalização e reificação da disciplina estatística. Mas para além de toda esta historiografia alia o seu argumento à forma lógica das inferências que podem ser tiradas por via estatística. Neste passo, a sua grande arma são os escritos sobre lógica e acaso de Charles Sanders Peirce que, por via da lógica, tornam pragmáticas as ideias estatísticas. Termina assumindo a associação directa que se pode fazer entre as teorias de Peirce e o poema de Mallarmé, «Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard».
December 2, 2009
An interesting take on how our world is ruled by a belief in randomness and the sciences that have developed in order to manage it. Primarily historical and philosophical in its treatment of the topic, it might have developed the political implications a little further, especially the collusion between science and government in the realm of statistical practice
June 30, 2022
There ought to be a name for a book in which the conclusion is so firmly established in the early pages for the reader that the rest of the book feels extraneous. That is the kind of book The Taming of Chance is. It's a truism that how we measure affects what we measure. Crime, say. Expand the class of actions deemed criminal and the number of actions deemed criminal increases. Compile data on this class of actions and publicize it and watch the masses fright. The Taming of Chance takes the truism how-measured/what-measured and and argues that statistical measurement dominates the mathematical sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences, virtually all domains of knowledge, in our contemporary era. This is demonstrated with a few examples in the book's introduction but then we're treated to a smorgasbord of other examples which make up the book's chapters. It's a bit of a drudge. Read the introduction and stop.
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May 30, 2022İstatistiksel düşünme biçiminin yerleşmesinin çok güzel yazılmış bir tarihi. Kitap 19. yüzyılın başından sonuna doğru neredeyse kronolojik olarak gidiyor. Hem bu yüzyıl boyunca şansın indirgenemezliğinin nasıl reddedilemez bir hal aldığını, hem de aynı süreç boyunca şansın nasıl terbiye edildiğini, nasıl irrasyonel ve anlaşılmaz olmaktan çıkarılıp açıklamaların bir parçası haline getirildiğini anlatıyor. Foucault'nun arkeolojisine bir katkı olarak da okunabilir; farklı taleplere cevap verebilecek, söz konusu süreci çok farklı yönleriyle bir arada anlatan bir metin.
Çeviriye gelince, kesinlikle yetersiz. Gayet güzel bir Türkçe kullanılmış ama terminolojik hakimiyet zayıf. Doğrudan İngilizceden okunabilir ya da sık sık orijinaliyle karşılaştırmak kaydıyla çeviriye şans verilebilir. Ama bu harika kitaptan bir şekilde istifade edilmesini tavsiye ediyorum.
Çeviriye gelince, kesinlikle yetersiz. Gayet güzel bir Türkçe kullanılmış ama terminolojik hakimiyet zayıf. Doğrudan İngilizceden okunabilir ya da sık sık orijinaliyle karşılaştırmak kaydıyla çeviriye şans verilebilir. Ama bu harika kitaptan bir şekilde istifade edilmesini tavsiye ediyorum.
October 11, 2018
Fascinating Foucauldian genealogy of statistics. I suspect this book will become more and more important over time during an era that is deeply suspicious of any kind of numerical calculation. (You don't need to be a math whiz to understand this book.)
November 26, 2022
Compared with "The Emergence of Probability", there is so much more happening, so much more writing and action to cover here, so it makes for a different book, but also very interesting. Worth it for just the little facts from Hacking's close readings of all of these thinkers along the way.
June 18, 2023
This is an excellent history of the evolution of statistics, probabilty theory, and understanding applications in many endeavors
This is really a "textbook" but well written and easy to read if you are interested in the subject.
This is really a "textbook" but well written and easy to read if you are interested in the subject.
July 19, 2023
Mijn korte recensie volgt nog!
April 28, 2024
Masterpiece
September 12, 2016
"Voted by the modern library as one of the 100 best non fiction books in English since 1900”. La premisa del libro es muy buena, demostrar que más que la relatividad, más que la evolución: la introducción de la probabilidad y la estadística en los siglos XVIII y XIX es el giro filosófico de mayor impacto en la sociedad moderna. Me gustaría mucho la cercana y detallada relación de los eventos, incluyendo curiosos elementos biográficos de los personajes… si no fuera porque estoy leyendo, a la par “Voltaire’s Bastards”, libro escrito con singular energía, gran colorido, que cubre el mismo periodo histórico, amén de época moderna e historia antigua, y que tiene una similar moraleja en contra de los sistemas “racionales” (Hacking, de hecho no hace una moraleja, más bien describe cómo se hizo prevalerte). Ralston Saul es mucho más interesante de leer que Hacking, por lo que dejé a éste último a la mitad. Uno de los cambios filosóficos sobre los que comenta Hacking es la creación del “hombre normal” y por extensión, de la eugénesis. Pero también de la inversión, en la imaginación popular de la relación entre causa y efecto respecto a el “hombre normal”, pone el ejemplo de los divorcios y el número de hijos. *No descrito así, sino mas bien como la creación de un estándar para la normalidad y extrapolarlo a un ideal, o un comportamiento esperado.
September 20, 2015
In this amazing work, Ian Hacking shows us the development of statistics. At first, statistics was used to find the "laws" of society. The patterns that were discovered were then utilized to as both prediction and explanation, to calibrate both the past and the future. Out of this use, the figure of the "normal" took over. This reinforced a position by which society then sought to calibrate itself in mediocrity. The present was thus always in decay, as normal slipped away due to change. At the same time, normal was understood as a purified state, one that people needed to attain to be "healthy." The resolution that these statistical laws were explanation and prediction thus reproduces itself in the field as ideology.
Both past and future are colonized by our imagined laws, explained by nothing yet colonizing everything.
Hacking here presents the theoretical mechanism, the heirs of Newtonism, as developing the formula for state policy and social control. From the end of the French Revolution to the development of the centrist liberal state, we have a consistent march towards state intervention through the technicalities of a healthier, managed people.
Both past and future are colonized by our imagined laws, explained by nothing yet colonizing everything.
Hacking here presents the theoretical mechanism, the heirs of Newtonism, as developing the formula for state policy and social control. From the end of the French Revolution to the development of the centrist liberal state, we have a consistent march towards state intervention through the technicalities of a healthier, managed people.
August 2, 2011
I read it as one of the compulsory reading set once when I did my training in India. Until the first half of the book I couldn't find it enjoyable but then it turns out to be the opposite. It talks about the scientific millstone of making explanation and prediction as precise as it could be, which is not set in a chronological timeliness, but in a dialogical way instead. Once regarded promising, statistical law in social science is put into trial by the ethical and methodological concerns as well as disruption in the fixity of the natural science.
April 7, 2012
Some of the most understandable, eloquent prose about science I've ever read. Wish I had a better background in philosophy to appreciate it more. Hacking looks at how statistics developed into a central element of modern science and logic.
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November 21, 2009None
December 5, 2010
Interesting look on the move from "chance" to "probability" -- and the role of statistics in statecraft.
May 24, 2021
已经忘了什么时候买的这么一本书…翻译的太差了，读着像天书。内容本身讲述的世界的概率问题，由于糟糕的翻译也无法搞懂其逻辑，读了一多半放弃。
April 7, 2017
A difficult read but well worth it!
April 29, 2017
Mucho meses. No era lo que esperaba, aunque no por ello es un mal libro. Pensé que era más de filosofía.
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February 4, 2019A well-narrated story in the Foucauldian-genealogical tradition of how we arrived at a way of doing a thing, in this case the statistical sciences, and the many now-forgotten fights over the meaning of norms, etc., that took place en route. And, as you can imagine, this being a genealogy, there was lots of discussion about how ethical, religious, metaphysical, and epistemological presuppositions were imposed during the early gathering of statistics. The niche for this is narrow, but I found it fascinating.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews