Article ID: CBB399530810

Lies, Damned Lies, and (Bourgeois) Statistics: Ascertaining Social Fact in Midcentury China and the Soviet Union (2018)

unapi

Is there a correct way to ascertain social fact? As late as the 1950s, the scientific community remained divided over this question. Its resolution involved not just epistemological and theoretical debates on the unity or disunity of statistical science but also practical considerations surrounding state-capacity building. For scientists in places like the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union, at stake was the very ability to realize the kind of planned economic growth that socialist countries idealized. The solution they chose reformulated statistics explicitly as a social science, salvaging it from what they then dismissed as the tainted, bourgeois, and socially unproductive pursuit of mathematical statistics. This distinction—most tangibly understood as the rejection of all probabilistic methods—had implications for both the ways in which data was collected and the ways in which it was analyzed.

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Article Lukas Rieppel; Eugenia Lean; William Deringer (2018) Introduction: The Entangled Histories of Science and Capitalism. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-24). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB399530810/

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Authors & Contributors
Jersild, Austin
Isaacson, Nathaniel
Bini, Elisabetta
Liu, Jinyan
Vezzosi, Elisabetta
Zhang, Baichun
Concepts
Science and politics
Socialism
Social sciences
Science and economics
Cold War
Capitalism
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century
Modern
20th century, early
Places
Soviet Union
China
People's Republic of China
Germany
Eastern Europe
West Germany
Institutions
Chinese Academy of Sciences
United States. Army. Corps of Engineers
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