Accuracy and precision
Actuary
Ammeter
Ancien Regime
Arithmometer
Bruno Latour
Bureaucrat
Calculation
Calorimeter
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Cavendish Laboratory
Certainty
Credibility
Determination
Dichotomy
Electrical engineering
Electricity
Electromagnetism
Engineering
Epistemology
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Experiment
Experimental philosophy
Experimental physics
Explanation
Grating
Hermann von Helmholtz
History and philosophy of science
Hypothesis
Ideology
Illustration
Insurance
Intendant
James Clerk Maxwell
James Prescott Joule
Least squares
Mathematician
Mathematics
Measurement
Mechanical equivalent of heat
Metric system
Metrology
Microscope
Montesquieu
Morality
Natural philosophy
Phenomenon
Philosophy
Physical law
Physicist
Physiology
Political economy
Princeton University Press
Probability
Publication
Quantification (science)
Quantitative research
Quantity
Reason
Requirement
Result
Rhetoric
Science
Scientist
Statistics
Technology
Textbook
Theory
Thermometer
Thomas Kuhn
Uncertainty
Voltmeter
Product details
- ISBN 9780691016016
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 06 Apr 1997
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The Values of Precision examines how exactitude has come to occupy such a prominent place in Western culture. What has been the value of numerical values? Beginning with the late eighteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, the essays in this volume support the view that centralizing states--with their increasingly widespread bureaucracies for managing trade, taxation, and armies--and large-scale commercial enterprises--with their requirements for standardization and mass production--have been the major promoters of numerical precision. Taking advantage of the resources available, scientists and engineers have entered a symbiotic relationship with state and industry, which in turn has led to increasingly refined measures in ever-widening domains of the natural and social world. At the heart of this book, therefore, is an inquiry into the capacity of numbers and instruments to travel across boundaries of culture and materials.
Many of the papers focus attention on disagreements about the significance and the credibility of particular sorts of measurements deployed to support particular claims, as in the measures of the population of France, the electrical resistance of copper, or the solvency of insurance companies. At the same time they display the deeply cultural character of precision values. Contributors to the volume include Ken Alder, Graeme J. N. Gooday, Jan Golinski, Frederic L. Holmes, Kathryn M. Olesko, Theodore M. Porter, Andrea Rusnock, Simon Schaffer, George Sweetnam, Andrew Warwick, and M. Norton Wise.
M. Norton Wise is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies for the Program in History of Science, Princeton University.
