Background
Porter, Theodore Mark was born on December 3, 1953 in Kelso, Washington, District of Columbia, United States. Son of Charles Clinton and Shirley Isobel (Tolle) Porter.
( This investigation of the overwhelming appeal of quanti...)
This investigation of the overwhelming appeal of quantification in the modern world discusses the development of cultural meanings of objectivity over two centuries. How are we to account for the current prestige and power of quantitative methods? The usual answer is that quantification is seen as desirable in social and economic investigation as a result of its successes in the study of nature. Theodore Porter is not content with this. Why should the kind of success achieved in the study of stars, molecules, or cells be an attractive model for research on human societies? he asks. And, indeed, how should we understand the pervasiveness of quantification in the sciences of nature? In his view, we should look in the reverse direction: comprehending the attractions of quantification in business, government, and social research will teach us something new about its role in psychology, physics, and medicine. Drawing on a wide range of examples from the laboratory and from the worlds of accounting, insurance, cost-benefit analysis, and civil engineering, Porter shows that it is "exactly wrong" to interpret the drive for quantitative rigor as inherent somehow in the activity of science except where political and social pressures force compromise. Instead, quantification grows from attempts to develop a strategy of impersonality in response to pressures from outside. Objectivity derives its impetus from cultural contexts, quantification becoming most important where elites are weak, where private negotiation is suspect, and where trust is in short supply.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691029083/?tag=2022091-20
( Emphasizing the debt of science to nonspecialist intell...)
Emphasizing the debt of science to nonspecialist intellectuals, Theodore Porter describes in detail the nineteenth-century background that produced the burst of modern statistical innovation of the early 1900s. Statistics arose as a study of society--the science of the statist--and the pioneering statistical physicists and biologists, Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Galton, each introduced statistical models by pointing to analogies between his discipline and social science.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/069102409X/?tag=2022091-20
( Karl Pearson, founder of modern statistics, came to thi...)
Karl Pearson, founder of modern statistics, came to this field by way of passionate early studies of philosophy and cultural history as well as ether physics and graphical geometry. His faith in science grew out of a deeply moral quest, reflected also in his socialism and his efforts to find a new basis for relations between men and women. This biography recounts Pearson's extraordinary intellectual adventure and sheds new light on the inner life of science. Theodore Porter's intensely personal portrait of Pearson extends from religious crisis and sexual tensions to metaphysical and even mathematical anxieties. Pearson sought to reconcile reason with enthusiasm and to achieve the impersonal perspective of science without sacrificing complex individuality. Even as he longed to experience nature directly and intimately, he identified science with renunciation and positivistic detachment. Porter finds a turning point in Pearson's career, where his humanistic interests gave way to statistical ones, in his Grammar of Science (1892), in which he attempted to establish scientific method as the moral educational basis for a refashioned culture. In this original and engaging book, a leading historian of modern science investigates the interior experience of one man's scientific life while placing it in a rich tapestry of social, political, and intellectual movements.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691126356/?tag=2022091-20
(Recounts Karl Pearson's extraordinary intellectual advent...)
Recounts Karl Pearson's extraordinary intellectual adventure and sheds light on the inner life of science. In this book, a leading historian of modern science investigates the interior experience of one man's scientific life while placing it in a tapestry of social, political, and intellectual movements.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FDVN9F4/?tag=2022091-20
(This book tells how quantitative ideas of chance have tra...)
This book tells how quantitative ideas of chance have transformed the natural and social sciences as well as everyday life over the past three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling, and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact on biology, physics, and psychology. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centers on how these technical innovations recreated our conceptions of nature, mind, and society.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/052139838X/?tag=2022091-20
Porter, Theodore Mark was born on December 3, 1953 in Kelso, Washington, District of Columbia, United States. Son of Charles Clinton and Shirley Isobel (Tolle) Porter.
AB, Stanford University, 1976. Doctor of Philosophy, Princeton University, 1981.
Postdoctoral instructor California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 1981-1984. Research member Zentrum fur interdisziplinaere Forschung der University Bielefeld, Germany, 1982-1983. Assistant professor history University Virginia, Charlottesville, 1984-1991.
Associate professor history University of California at Los Angeles, 1991—1995, professor history, since 1995, chair Center Cultural History of Science, Technology and Medicine, 1992—1994, 1995—1998, academic vice chair, 1997—1998, vice chair undergraduate affairs. Visiting chair history of science University Utrecht, Netherlands, 1999.
( Emphasizing the debt of science to nonspecialist intell...)
( Karl Pearson, founder of modern statistics, came to thi...)
( This investigation of the overwhelming appeal of quanti...)
(This book tells how quantitative ideas of chance have tra...)
(Recounts Karl Pearson's extraordinary intellectual advent...)
(Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include compa...)
Fellow American Academy Arts and Sciences. Member History of Science Society (member council 1991-1993), American History Association.
Married Diane Rita Campbell, August 19, 1979. 1 child, David Campbell.