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Theodore M. Porter [28]Theodore Porter [25]
  1.  57
    The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life.Gerd Gigerenzer, Zeno Swijtink, Theodore Porter, Lorraine Daston, John Beatty & Lorenz Kruger - 1990 - Cambridge University Press.
    The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but (...)
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  2.  21
    Trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life.Theodore M. Porter - 1995 - Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
    What accounts for the prestige of quantitative methods? The usual answer is that quantification is desirable in social investigation as a result of its successes in science. Trust in Numbers questions whether such success in the study of stars, molecules, or cells should be an attractive model for research on human societies, and examines why the natural sciences are highly quantitative in the first place. Theodore Porter argues that a better understanding of the attractions of quantification in business, government, and (...)
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  3.  39
    New historical and philosophical perspectives on quantitative genetics.Davide Serpico, Kate E. Lynch & Theodore M. Porter - 2023 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 97:29-33.
    The aim of this virtual special issue is to bring together philosophical and historical perspectives to address long-standing issues in the interpretation, utility, and impacts of quantitative genetics methods and findings. Methodological approaches and the underlying scientific understanding of genetics and heredity have transformed since the field's inception. These advances have brought with them new philosophical issues regarding the interpretation and understanding of quantitative genetic results. The contributions in this issue demonstrate that there is still work to be done integrating (...)
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  4. Making Things Quantitative.Theodore M. Porter - 1994 - Science in Context 7 (3):389-407.
    The ArgumentQuantification is not merely a strategy for describing the social and natural worlds, but a means of reconfiguring them. It entails the imposition of new meanings and the disappearance of old ones. Often it is allied to systems of experimental or administrative control, and in fact considerable feats of human organization are generally required even to create stable, reasonably standardized measures. This essay urges that the uses of quantification in science, social science, and bureaucratic social and economic policy are (...)
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  5. The Cambridge history of science: The modern social sciences.Theodore M. Porter & Dorothy Ross - 2003 - History of Science 7.
    Forty-two essays by authors from five continents and many disciplines provide a synthetic account of the history of the social sciences-including behavioral and economic sciences since the late eighteenth century. The authors emphasize the cultural and intellectual preconditions of social science, and its contested but important role in the history of the modern world. While there are many historical books on particular disciplines, there are very few about the social sciences generally, and none that deal with so much of the (...)
     
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  6. Reforming vision : the engineer Le Play learns to observe society sagely.Theodore M. Porter - 2011 - In Lorraine Daston & Elizabeth Lunbeck (eds.), Histories of scientific observation. London: University of Chicago Press.
     
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  7.  15
    Statistics and the politics of objectivity.Theodore M. Porter - 1993 - Revue de Synthèse 114 (1):87-101.
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  8.  43
    The promotion of mining and the advancement of science: the chemical revolution of mineralogy.Theodore M. Porter - 1981 - Annals of Science 38 (5):543-570.
    This paper explores the origins of the analytical definition of simple substance, a concept whose central importance in the new chemistry of Lavoisier and his colleagues is now widely recognized. I argue that this notion derived from the practical activities of metallurgists and mineral assayers, and that the theoretical elaboration necessary for the analytical concept to be understood as relevant to chemistry was inspired by the efforts of enlightened rulers in Sweden and Germany to turn chemical science to the benefit (...)
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  9.  27
    Is the Life of the Scientist a Scientific Unit?Theodore Porter - 2006 - Isis 97 (2):314-321.
    The biographical study of scientists, though familiar, has mostly seemed anodyne rather than profound as a tool of history of science. But it bears closely on the public role of the scientist, associated nowadays with the detachment of objectivity and with a sense of the scientific life as a fracturing of “the science” from other aspects of a career. Although this division is indeed characteristic of the modern scientific identity, historians should not take it as natural or inevitable. The life (...)
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  10.  33
    Introduction: Historicizing the Two Cultures.Theodore M. Porter - 2005 - History of Science 43 (2):109-114.
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  11. Speaking precision to power: The modern political role of social science.Theodore M. Porter - 2006 - Social Research: An International Quarterly 73 (4):1273-1294.
     
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  12.  20
    Annual Meeting of the History of Science Society Washington, D.C., 27-30 December 1992.Theodore Porter, Karl Huibauer, Michael Sokal, Joan Richards & Marshall Clagett - 1993 - Isis 84:339-346.
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  13.  38
    Author’s response.Theodore M. Porter - 1997 - Metascience 6 (1):87-89.
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  14.  33
    Charles Coulston Gillispie.Theodore M. Porter - 2016 - Isis 107 (1):121-126.
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  15.  33
    Edgeworth on Chance, Economic Hazard, and Statistics. Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Philip Mirowski.Theodore Porter - 1995 - Isis 86 (3):517-518.
  16.  27
    Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators, and Professionals. Roy MacLeod.Theodore Porter - 1989 - Isis 80 (4):744-745.
  17.  18
    Histoire du calcul économique en FranceFrançois Etner.Theodore Porter - 1990 - Isis 81 (3):589-590.
  18.  15
    Introduction: The Statistical Office as a Social Observatory.Theodore M. Porter - 2007 - Centaurus 49 (4):258-260.
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  19.  18
    L'économiste, la science, et la pouvoir: Le cas WalrasHervé Dumez.Theodore Porter - 1989 - Isis 80 (3):533-534.
  20.  33
    Les maitres de l'erreur: Mesure et probabilite au XIXe siecle. Stephane Callens.Theodore Porter - 1997 - Isis 88 (4):714-715.
  21.  19
    Modern Facts and Postmodern Interpretations.Theodore M. Porter - 2001 - Annals of Science 58 (4):417-422.
  22.  22
    The American Census: A Social History. Margo J. Anderson.Theodore Porter - 1989 - Isis 80 (2):296-298.
  23.  26
    The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century BritainRoger Cooter.Theodore Porter - 1986 - Isis 77 (2):381-383.
  24.  53
    The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900. Stephen M. Stigler.Theodore Porter - 1988 - Isis 79 (2):326-327.
  25.  25
    The Norton History of the Human Sciences. Roger Smith.Theodore Porter - 2001 - Isis 92 (3):644-644.
  26.  45
    The Politics of Numbers. William Alonso, Paul Starr.Theodore Porter - 1990 - Isis 81 (2):374-375.
  27.  37
    The Search for a Methodology of Social Science: Durkheim, Weber, and the Nineteenth-Century Problem of Cause, Probability, and Action. Stephen P. Turner.Theodore Porter - 1988 - Isis 79 (1):109-110.
  28.  21
    The uses of humanistic history.Theodore M. Porter - 1991 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21 (2):214-222.
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  29.  35
    Who's Who in Economics: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Economists, 1700-1986Mark Blaug.Theodore Porter - 1987 - Isis 78 (1):92-93.
  30.  23
    Andre Wakefield. The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice. x + 226 pp., illus., tables, bibl., index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. $45. [REVIEW]Theodore Porter - 2010 - Isis 101 (2):433-434.
  31.  39
    Christopher Herbert. Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery. xvi + 302 pp., bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. $43, £27.50 ; $16, £10.50. [REVIEW]Theodore Porter - 2002 - Isis 93 (2):311-312.
    Christopher Herbert, provoked by the Alan Sokal affair and by bullying critiques of “relativism,” has written this study to demonstrate the prominence of relativistic thought in the sciences of the last two centuries. Although he draws back from any claim that relativity and its opposite, philosophical realism, lead of necessity to particular political positions, he associates the former with liberal tolerance and the latter with mandatory worship in a repressive “church of ‘absolute truth’”. Nazi physicists such as Philipp Lenard, he (...)
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  32.  41
    Graeme J. N. Gooday. The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice. xxv + 285 pp. illus., index. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $85. [REVIEW]Theodore Porter - 2005 - Isis 96 (1):156-157.
  33.  33
    Lorraine Daston. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Pp. xviii + 423. ISBN 0-691-08497-1, £27.50, $49.50. [REVIEW]Theodore M. Porter - 1989 - British Journal for the History of Science 22 (4):444-446.
  34.  26
    Michel Armatte. La science économique comme ingénierie: Quantification et modélisation. 354 pp., bibl., index. Paris: Presses des Mines, 2010. €29. [REVIEW]Theodore M. Porter - 2012 - Isis 103 (1):216-217.
  35.  25
    Nicholas Wright Gillham. A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. 416 pp., illus., figs., notes, bibl., index. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. $30. [REVIEW]Theodore M. Porter - 2002 - Isis 93 (3):491-492.
  36.  21
    Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam sent , science bought and sold: Essays in the economics of science. Chicago and London: University of chicago press, 2002. Pp. IX+573. Isbn 0-226-53857-5. £21.00, $33.00. [REVIEW]Theodore Porter - 2003 - British Journal for the History of Science 36 (3):381-383.
  37.  29
    Philip Mirowski, More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xii + 450. ISBN 0-521-35042-5. £35.00, $59.50. [REVIEW]Theodore Porter - 1991 - British Journal for the History of Science 24 (1):110-111.
  38.  35
    W. F. Bynum;, Roy Porter . Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations. xvi + 736 pp., index. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. $50. [REVIEW]Theodore M. Porter - 2006 - Isis 97 (2):388-389.