A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and SocietyUniversity of Chicago Press, 1998 - 419 頁 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. 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. |
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abstractions accompt Adam Smith argued argument associated Bacon Baconian Boyle Britain British Cambridge University Press chap chapter claims collection commerce conjectural history constituted counting critical Daston David Hume Defoe Discourse double-entry bookkeeping double-entry system Dugald Stewart early modern edited effects eighteenth eighteenth-century England English epistemological Essay experience experimental moral historians Hobbes human nature Hume Hume's Hutcheson individuals instruments interest John Johnson kind of knowledge knowledge production laws London Lorraine Daston Malthus Malthus's Malynes mathematical McCulloch mercantile merchants method Misselden mode modern fact moral philosophy natural philosophers numbers numerical representation objects observed particulars Petty's political arithmetic political economy practice principles problem of induction produced providential readers reason records relation rhetoric Robert Boyle Royal Society Scottish Scottish Enlightenment seemed sense seventeenth century Shaftesbury simply social Sprat statistics Stewart systematic knowledge theoretical theory Thomas Thomas Mun tion trade Treatise variant virtue wanted