The Taming of Chance (Ideas in Context) [Paperback]

Ian Hacking (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 1990 | ISBN-10: 0521388848 | ISBN-13: 978-0521388849 | Edition: 1

In this important new study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as his best selling Emergence of Probability. Professor Hacking shows how by the late nineteenth century it became possible to think of statistical patterns as explanatory in themselves, and to regard the world as not necessarily deterministic in character. Combining detailed scientific historical research with characteristic philosophic breath and verve, The Taming of Chance brings out the relations among philosophy, the physical sciences, mathematics and the development of social institutions, and provides a unique and authoritative analysis of the "probabilization" of the Western world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Hacking has an uncanny instinct for honing in upon some critical and novel feature of the past and showing how seemingly disparate facts fall into place once we grant him his central category. He does not pretend to make a complete survey of his topic. Again like an archaelogist, he respects the fragmentary record as one of the limitations of the trade. But what he digs up and deciphers never fails to engage and illuminate." Science

"My summary hardly does justice to the richness of Hacking's ideas or his many asides, like the striking comparison of Peirce and Friedrich Nietzsche....Hacking's meticulous scholarship, his comprehension of various areas of learning, and his commitment to linear exposition seem to me to exceed Foucault's." Bruce Kuklick, American Historical Review

"The Taming of Chance contains a wealth of information and is very pleasant reading. The various pursuits that impinge on the taming of chance and the development of statistical law are overwhelming. I recommend this book strongly to anyone interested in the development of statistical thought." Peter Guttorp, Journal of the American Statistical Association

Book Description

In the course of a continuing inquiry into the origins and development of contemporary thought, this study reveals how statistical patterns were finally perceived in a non-deterministic manner by the end of the late nineteenth century.

Product Details

• Paperback: 277 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (August 31, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521388848
• ISBN-13: 978-0521388849
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #126,323 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating chapter in the 'history of the present'., September 30, 2007

By 

P. Taborsky (Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Taming of Chance (Ideas in Context) (Hardcover)

This is a fascinating book, which charts the gradual development of statistical ideas in the nineteenth century, along with associated concepts, such as normalcy, chance, and determinism.

However, a few criticisms are in order. Hacking reports that there was a certain conceptual incoherence surrounding ideas relating to statistics in the 19th century, especially concerning ideas relating to determinism and chance. But I'm not quite sure that Hacking has been able to find the thread out of this confusion, as some confusions appear to remain rather resistant in spite of the narrative, which in general is admiringly clear. Three points will serve as examples:

Eastern and Western: Hacking describes two broad classes of reaction to the development of statistical reasoning; 'Western' (U.K. and France) and 'Eastern' (centred on what was then Prussia) approaches. Western thought, which was largely open to statistical reasoning, is described by Hacking as 'atomistic, individualistic, and liberal'. Eastern thought on the other hand was 'holistic, collectivist, and conservative', and critical of the developing trends of statistics.

Geographical and political issues aside, this characterization almost at once falls apart. For instance, slightly later in the book we are told that statistical methods were resisted in (French) medicine, as medicine was concerned with the individual case, not the average or normal, and hence statistical data was of no use. Immediately after reporting this, Hacking queries, without irony, 'how then could there be a use of statistics in human affairs? In the very institution designed to strip away the individuality of man, namely the court of law'. To add to the confusion, we later find out that Engel, the Prussian apparatchik, and hence 'Eastern' thinker, considered statistical reasoning to be part of a certain mentality he wished to avoid, that of determinism, which denies individual freedom. Likewise, the economist Wagner, Hacking reports, also adhered to this view. In fact there appears to have been a general resistance to statistical methods in the 'East' precisely because the so-called individualistic methods of the statisticians were seen as a threat to the concept of human freedom and individuality.

Durkheim, the French sociologist, whom we are at one point told was 'immersed' in the Western mentality, nevertheless ascribed the functioning of statistical laws to 'collective tendencies', in fact to 'social forces', rather than to the 'underlying little independent causes' of Quetelet, the French pioneer of statistical methodology.

No doubt there was some sort of difference at play here between East and West, but it strikes me that trying to distinguish these two cultures by calling one individualistic and the other collectivist does little to help.

The Title of the book: 'The Taming of Chance', especially if one recalls the title of Hacking's earlier book, 'The Emergence of Probability' which dealt with the preceding era, leads one to think that there are two parts to the development of the ideas mentioned in the book - initially, the emergence of ideas relating to chance and probability, and later their gradual 'taming'. But that would be a mistake. Hacking makes it quite clear that probabilistic and statistical laws were not initially seen to be in conflict with necessity or determinism. Hume, and other enlightenment thinkers, regarded chance as unreal, as merely an illusion caused by lack of knowledge. There was simply no chance around to be tamed, before the nineteenth century. It would appear instead that chance and its 'taming' emerged at the same time - the book then might have been more aptly titled 'The Emergence of Chance'. The idea of 'taming' seems to have slipped in from one of the book's sub-themes, the idea that statistical methods led to greater institutional control of human affairs, or from a certain conception of causality that I shall mention below.

Multiple causality, or causal sets: Quetelet, the French astronomer turned statistician, proposed a theory of 'little independent causes' to explain statistical regularity. The causes of individual cases of, say, suicide, or coin tosses, work independently of each other, but taken as a group, over all cases, they total up in a way predictable by probabilities. As far as Hacking is concerned this explanation 'does not hang together'. Be that as it may, it strikes me that there is an important aspect of Quetelet's purported explanation that deserves attention, and that is the idea that causes are best understood as existing in sets or groups. This idea is reinforced by similar attempts to explain the workings of statistical regularity later mentioned in the book - the holism of Boutroux and Durkheim, as well as the ideas of Peirce and Nietzsche. The latter two, for instance, tried to accommodate probability within causality by claiming that while causality itself may act in a determinate manner, the existence of specific causal laws themselves are a matter of chance. This explanation is not meaningful, it seems to me, unless one brings a prior notion of possibility to play in the existence of particular causal laws - not simply their actuality - as is done with the contemporary notion of possible worlds. To say that laws p, q, and r are possible in certain situations, but only p is actual in this case, is to use the idea of sets or classes of laws which are compossible with certain situations.

There is certainly an ambiguity in the concept of chance; there are at least two ideas involved: chance as opposed to causality, as pure chaos; and chance in consort with causality, 'tamed' chance, so-to-speak, chance that can '[bring] order out of chaos', chance that can support 'laws of chance' (quoted from the book's chapter summaries). Perhaps the idea of causal sets can bring some clarity to a familiar but nevertheless obscure concept, and to help to distinguish between different kinds of indeterminism that are often conflated.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Commentary, November 29, 2008

By 

R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Taming of Chance (Ideas in Context) (Hardcover)

This is an extended essay by the distinguished philosopher Ian Hacking on the theme of probability versus determinism. Something of a hybrid, this is not strictly a philosophical work but a historical commentary on how ideas of chance and probability developed in the 19th century. As Hacking points out at the beginning of the book, a deterministic view of the world was demolished by the emergence of quantum mechanics in the 20th century. In The Taming of Chance, Hacking covers the development of statistics as a discipline and ideas of probability to demonstrate the gradual undermining of the notion of determinism in the course of the 19th century. Hacking opens with Enlightenment ideas of causation, very much under the influence of Newtonian mechanics, and concludes with the thought of CS Peirce, whom he sees as exemplifying acceptance of essentially stochastic views of causation.

Hacking presents this change in world view as driven by a number of intersecting, complex, and unexpected phenomena. A major one was the expansion of the state and systematization of government, particularly associated with Napoleonic France. This leads to the generation of large demographic and social datasets that often reveal unexpected regularities, such as the persistent uneven male to female birth ratio. These datasets not only require new methods of analysis but led to the idea of the idea of statistical 'laws.' Hacking emphasizes that the collection and analysis of this kind of data was driven in part, and in turn fed, by a desire to achieve a higher level of social control. The emergence of social statistics combines with a number of other trends, such as the idea of organ pathology in medicine, the increasingly physiological orientation in biology, and a general emphasis on quanitification in the sciences, to generate a set of new attitudes towards data and ideas of causation. In several aspects, Hacking presents a series of apparently paradoxical or perhaps ironic events, such the desire for improved social control contributing to recognition of stochastic causation, which ultimately transform ideas of causation.

In many respects, this is a somewhat exploratory essay and Hacking's narrative is not laid out smoothly. This book presupposes some prior knowledge of 19th century science and philosophy. It is also dense in the sense that Hacking has compressed a great deal of analysis into a relatively short book. Nonetheless, its worth taking the effort to read it carefully because of Hacking's insightful analysis and knowledge of a broad range of 19th century intellectual history. His reconstruction of how we got from the Enlightenment to Peirce is really impressive.

This book is notable also for Hacking's interesting comments on a number of other features. He has an interesting discussion, for example, of the development of the concept of normality and its consequences. His brief comment about the relationship between Peirce's pragmatism and 19th century idealism is really illuminating.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Work, June 9, 2011

By 

JSmalls - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Taming of Chance (Ideas in Context) (Paperback)

This may be the greatest work of non-fiction I have ever read. It explains so much about Western society in such an understated way that it is shocking. It remains a must read!