A retelling of the history of British empiricism from the point of view of political economy and the numerical fact. Poovey (English and history of the production of knowledge, New York U.) examines the question of whether facts are incontrovertible data that simply demonstrates what is true or if they are bits of evidence marshaled to persuade others of the theory that one started out with. She discusses scientific impartiality and objectivity, how political economics rose out of a concern for market economics, and develops a history of abstraction based on universals, generalizations, and aggregates. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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.
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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