A history of the modern fact problems of knowledge in the sciences of wealth and society / [electronic resource] :
Mary Poovey.
- University of Chicago Press, 1998.
- 1 online resource (xxv, 419 p.)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 387-407) and index.
The modern fact, the problem of induction, and questions of method -- Accommodating merchants: double-entry bookkeeping, mercantile expertise, and the effect of accuracy -- The political anatomy of the economy: English science and Irish land -- Experimental moral philosophy and the problems of liberal governmentality -- From conjectural history to political economy -- Reconfiguring facts and theory: vestiges of providentialism in the new science of wealth -- Figures of arithmetic, figures of speech: the problem of induction in the 1830s.
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.