 | |
| Editors | Andrea Mennicken Robert Salais |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subjects | Social statistics Politics |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
Publication date | 2022 |
| Pages | 497 |
| ISBN | 978-3-03-078201-6 |
The New Politics of Numbers: Utopia, evidence and democracy is a multi-author book edited by sociologists Andrea Mennicken and Robert Salais and published in 2022 by Palgrave Macmillan.
This work connects to the 1989 volume The Politics of Numbers of William Alonso and Paul Starr, [1] as well to the French school of sociology of quantification of Alain Desrosières’ The Politics of Large Numbers , Laurent Thévenot, the same Robert Salais, and other scholars in France and the UK.[ needs copy edit ] The volume [2] sets out to investigate the power of numbers, how they travel across countries and domains, how they may be implicated in dreams of making things differently and creating new worlds, and how they establish new regimes of accountability and regulation. [3] The book devotes particular attention to the linkages between numbers and democracy. [4]
The book was inspired by a working group on social quantification at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2014. [5] It is inspired by two strands of research: one related to Foucauldian ideas of power and control, which were studied by historians and sociologists at the London School of Economics; and the other being the "economics of conventions" or "theory of conventions", studied by various French scholars, including Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot, and originally by Alain Desrosières. [5]
The chapter of Peter Miller investigates the role of numbers in the making of health policies. [6] The role of quantification in the making of international certification standards is discussed by Thévenot. [7] Uwe Vormbusch provides an account of the movement of the quantified self, [8] while Boris Samuel provides an example of Statactivism staged in French Guadeloupe. [9] Ota De Leonardis discusses how numbers permit a semantic shift in the meaning of inequality. [10] The book also contains chapters from other scholars such as Emmanuel Didier, Martine Mespoulet, Tom Lang, Corine Eyraud and others. Wendy Nelson Espeland writes the foreword "What Numbers Do".
Harro Maas writes that "it is just impossible to open a newspaper or news site without being reminded of the themes addressed in this volume" after having read the book. [5]
The Open Source Definition (OSD) is a document published by the Open Source Initiative. Derived from Bruce Perens' Debian Free Software Guidelines, the definition is the most common standard for open-source software. The definition has ten criteria, such as requiring freely accessed source code and granting the open-source rights to everyone who receives a copy of the program. Covering both copyleft and permissive licenses, it is effectively identical to the definition of free software, but motivated by more pragmatic and business-friendly considerations. The Open Source Initiative's board votes on proposals of licenses to certify that they are compliant with the definition, and maintains a list of compliant licenses on its website. The definition has been adapted into the Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Definition for open knowledge and into open hardware definitions.
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Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the study of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It examines how conclusions follow from premises based on the structure of arguments alone, independent of their topic and content. Informal logic is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. Informal logic examines arguments expressed in natural language whereas formal logic uses formal language. When used as a countable noun, the term "a logic" refers to a specific logical formal system that articulates a proof system. Logic plays a central role in many fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics.
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