Karl Pearson was an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London in 1911, and contributed significantly to the field of biometrics and meteorology. Pearson was also a proponent of Social Darwinism and eugenics, and his thought is an example of what is today described as scientific racism. Pearson was a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. He edited and completed both William Kingdon Clifford's Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885) and Isaac Todhunter's History of the Theory of Elasticity, Vol. 1 (1886–1893) and Vol. 2 (1893), following their deaths.
Science studies is an interdisciplinary research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in broad social, historical, and philosophical contexts. It uses various methods to analyze the production, representation and reception of scientific knowledge and its epistemic and semiotic role.
The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing with "the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity." The sociology of scientific ignorance (SSI) is complementary to the sociology of scientific knowledge. For comparison, the sociology of knowledge studies the impact of human knowledge and the prevailing ideas on societies and relations between knowledge and the social context within which it arises.
Post-normal science (PNS) was developed in the 1990s by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz. It is a problem-solving strategy appropriate when "facts [are] uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent", conditions often present in policy-relevant research. In those situations, PNS recommends suspending temporarily the traditional scientific ideal of truth, concentrating on quality as assessed by internal and extended peer communities.
Objectivity in science is an attempt to uncover truths about the natural world by eliminating personal biases, emotions, and false beliefs. It is often linked to observation as part of the scientific method. It is thus intimately related to the aim of testability and reproducibility. To be considered objective, the results of measurement must be communicated from person to person, and then demonstrated for third parties, as an advance in a collective understanding of the world. Such demonstrable knowledge has ordinarily conferred demonstrable powers of prediction or technology.
Steven Shapin is an American historian and sociologist of science. He is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is considered one of the earliest scholars on the sociology of scientific knowledge, and is credited with creating new approaches. He has won many awards, including the 2014 George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society for career contributions to the field.
The history of the social sciences has origin in the common stock of Western philosophy and shares various precursors, but began most intentionally in the early 18th century with the positivist philosophy of science. Since the mid-20th century, the term " social science" has come to refer more generally, not just to sociology, but to all those disciplines which analyze society and culture; from anthropology to psychology to media studies.
The George Sarton Medal is the most prestigious award given by the History of Science Society. It has been awarded annually since 1955. It is awarded to an historian of science from the international community who became distinguished for "a lifetime of scholarly achievement" in the field.
The Pfizer Award is awarded annually by the History of Science Society "in recognition of an outstanding book dealing with the history of science"
Edward Murray East was an American plant geneticist, botanist, agronomist and eugenicist. He is known for his experiments that led to the development of hybrid corn and his support of 'forced' elimination of the 'unfit' based on eugenic findings. He worked at the Bussey Institute of Harvard University where he performed a key experiment showing the outcome of crosses between lines that differ in a quantitative trait. He is also known as a critic of consumption and as a pioneer of thinking about environmental limits. While some scholars see his population thinking as nothing more than eugenics on a global scale, others see his population thinking as driven by environmental concerns, not eugenics.
The philosophy of statistics involves the meaning, justification, utility, use and abuse of statistics and its methodology, and ethical and epistemological issues involved in the consideration of choice and interpretation of data and methods of statistics.
In mathematics and empirical science, quantification is the act of counting and measuring that maps human sense observations and experiences into quantities. Quantification in this sense is fundamental to the scientific method.
Jenny Thomann-Koller was a gynecologist, pediatrician, and Head of Internal Medicine at the Schweizerische Pflegerinnenschule mit Spital in Zurich. In her dissertation, Beitrag zur Erblichkeitsstatistik der Geisteskranken im Ct. Zürich. Vergleichung derselben mit der erblichen Belastung gesunder Menschen u. dergl., published in 1895, she introduced a control group which challenged the then-popular theory of degeneration and eugenics.
The sociologyof quantification is the investigation of quantification as a sociological phenomenon in its own right.
Ethics of quantification is the study of the ethical issues associated to different forms of visible or invisible forms of quantification. These could include algorithms, metrics/indicators, statistical and mathematical modelling, as noted in a review of various aspects of sociology of quantification.
The French movement of statactivism advocates for the mobilization of statistics in support to social movements and agendas.
Andrea Saltelli is an Italian scholar studying quantification with statistical and sociological tools, extending the theory of sensitivity analysis to sensitivity auditing.
The Politics of Large Numbers is a history book by French statistician, sociologist and historian of science, Alain Desrosières, which was originally published in French in 1993. The English translation, by Camille Naish, was published in 1998 by Harvard University Press.
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.
Trust in numbers is a book of Theodore Porter published in 1995 by Princeton University Press.
