Trust in Numbers: the Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life
By Theodore M. Porter
Princeton University Press
310 pp.; $24.95, hardcover;
$16.95, paper

This morning's edition of the London Times reported on a recent speech made by the British chancellor of the exchequer, Kenneth Clarke. "Our recovery is now in its fourth year," he announced. "Output is nearly already 7 per cent higher than it was before the recession. Unemployment is down by over three quarters of a million. . . . Exports are up by 15 per cent in the last two years. Inflation has been below 4 per cent for three and a half years. That's the longest period of inflation at that level for almost half a century."1

Such statistical talk is now the lingua franca of the public square. Numbers exercise power in society, for they enjoy immense social kudos. Governments parade their accomplishments in terms of capital investment and economic growth; colleges and universities produce performance tables; psychologists measure human intelligence on a distribution curve; economists regale us with the retail price index and inflation levels; merchant bankers and international financiers monitor the balance of payments and exchange rates; environmental planners speak the language of cost-benefit analysis. And all are contested with opposing rates and ratios!

The ritual incantation of statistical claim and counterclaim suggests that number today is as magical as numerology was in medieval astrology. Nothing, it seems, can escape the rule of the statistical imperative. In the early days of the development of statistical analysis, for example, Sir Francis Galton--cousin of Darwin, eugenicist, African explorer, and pioneer of regression analysis--entertained the readers of Nature with his sure-shot optimal method of cutting a cake,2 conducted his own statistical inquiries into the efficacy of prayer,3 and also found it worth his while to prepare a map of the geographical distribution of female beauty in Britain.4 Or again, take the case of the tables produced by the Bureau de Statistique in nineteenth-century France. These tabulations annually revealed a small number of males in their twenties marrying septuagenarian women. These were rapidly seized upon by the statistical manipulators with the result that otherwise disparate individuals found themselves constituting a group that, in turn, became the locus of scholarly interrogation.

The range of questions to be asked of such a group--or of any other demographic data set now inhabiting the inner reaches of online digitized information archives--is well nigh limitless. Do they share ethnic or class characteristics? Have they common psycho-social profiles? Do they occupy similar niches in the political and economic order? Do they display any distinct pattern of geographical distribution or religious affiliation? Perhaps they enjoy similar dietary habits and culinary appetites, or like the same novelists, or take part in the same sporting activities. Indeed, the cluster may crystallize--say as "gerontophiles" or some other such neologism. In this way statistical manipulation displays its capacity to create social entities--and then to exert power over them.

How has this state of affairs come about? How is it that this push toward the objectification of knowledge has come to have such a grip on the modern world? Why do quantitative methods enjoy such prestige and power? These are the questions animating Theodore Porter's excursion into the world of numerical analysis in modern times. And these questions are all the more in need of resolution since he rejects the standard explanation that accounts for social and economic objectification as a response to its success in the sciences of nature.

Very early during the scientific revolution, quantitative methods were applied to social phenomena for political, demographic, and actuarial purposes.5 So, instead of looking to the natural sciences, Porter directs our attention to the worlds of business, insurance, and state engineering. As he puts it in the preface: "When we begin to comprehend the overwhelming appeal of quantification in business, government, and social research, we will also have learned something new about its role in physical chemistry and ecology." This volume thus continues a tradition of work that Porter has already established in The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (1986) and in the coauthored The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (1989).

Before turning to these arenas, however, Porter spends a good deal of time reflecting on the "power of numbers" and on the cultural matrix within which that power is constituted. The conceptual mainstay of his project is firmly anchored in the new historical sociology of science.

Briefly put, this is a tradition of scholarship that seeks to root seemingly transcendental scientific knowledge in the specificities of locality; that routinely refuses to take scientific claims at their face value and worries away at the social interests of scientific practitioners; that endeavors to lay bare the social roots of modern society's acquiescence to scientific authority; and that resolutely interrogates what scientists do rather than what they say they do. Numbers, like graphs and formulas, are thus to be considered, first and foremost, as "strategies of communication," that is, as rhetorical devices of persuasion adopted by interlocutors to bolster their conceptual interests. The success of quantification is therefore to be sought in its capacity to triumph over the tyranny of distance. The well-nigh universality of the language of quantity means that it is suited to "communication that goes beyond the boundaries of locality and community."

And yet, right from the outset, Porter makes it clear that he fully intends to skirt his way around the vexed realism versus relativism question by deftly--and defiantly--reminding us that

interested human actors make science, but they cannot make it however they choose. They are constrained, though not absolutely, by what can be seen in nature or can be made to happen in the laboratory. . . . Let us suppose for the sake of argument that scientific investigation is able to yield true knowledge about objects and processes in the world. It must nonetheless do so through social processes. There is no other way.

With this "declaration of faith," as he himself puts it, Porter--entirely wisely, in my view--moves on beyond the interminable internecine warfare between realists and antirealists to more historically engaging questions gravitating around his arresting contention that the "credibility of numbers . . . is a social and moral problem."

Let us deal first with the social character of the measurement enterprise. The issues here revolve around matters of standardization, validation, and what might be called the polity of number. It is plain, of course, that successful measurement requires a uniformity of standards; only in this way can competences transcend the local and achieve universality. Standardization, to put it another way, is needed to overcome geography; thereby knowledge is relieved of the burden of on-site judgment. Faith is no longer put in local know-how but rather in "impersonal technological and regulatory mechanisms."

To achieve this, however, is far from straightforward. In eighteenth-century Europe, for example, agricultural produce was measured using local weights; but these were hardly sufficient for trade further afield. What was necessary to overcome mensural variation--since maintaining a region's own bushel measure was regarded as a symbol of liberty--was the power of the state to set standards of measurement and judgment. We are all now happy to comply with standard measures; but Porter exposes the contested and complex character of their establishment by a detailed scrutiny of efforts to standardize, and thus stabilize, medical and biological measures--antitoxins, insulin, and the like. The result is a convincing demonstration that measurement produces what he calls "a world of artifice."

It is through such standardization procedures that numbers are made valid, and this requires hefty doses of social power. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more clearly revealed than in official statistical categorization. Teams of research assistants are rigorously drilled in data-gathering exercises; information is returned to what Bruno Latour calls centers of calculation, and the official finding proclaimed. Throughout, entities of all sorts are organized into what are all-too-often highly contingent categories. But, as Porter says, "having become official . . . they become increasingly real." Thereafter they become crucial to the management of society, and indeed to the management of nature, for Porter makes the case that scientific thinking has been suffused with just such econometric modes of thought.

Given these characteristics, it is hardly surprising that the spirit of quantification is as much a political as a scientific ideal. Using the example of France, Porter reveals how modern states are quantitative societies insofar as they amass demographic and educational statistics as indices of civic morality. Faith in these numbers thus evinces a profound confidence in the capacity to effect social progress through disseminating public information. Besides, statistical methodology allows one to work at reforming a social problem--but at a safe distance from it. In modern Britain, France, and America it has enabled philanthropists to present moral statistics of social malaise--disease, criminality, unemployment--even while remaining distant from the objects of their scrutiny.

Thanks to its remarkable flexibility, it is hardly surprising that the polity of number is shared by those on both the political Left and Right. Like technology, numerical analysis remains largely uncontested within the establishment of the modern state. Perhaps this is because by focusing on the measurable, on the observable, on the superficial, the statistical guild can transcend national frontiers and disciplinary boundaries, and connect academic discourse with political rhetoric.

If Victorian statisticians could boast that "science averaged away everything contingent, accidental, inexplicable, or personal, and left only large-scale regularities," the self-same erasures are still secured through what might be dubbed the imperialism of the mean. In everything from health management to educational provision, the statistical leveling of social topography and the neglect of individual need in the interests of standard service reassert themselves. The information industry managing such public affairs looks set to stay. For modern statistical society is serviced by a massive army of people making a living from the accumulation and exchange of data. With "hands [that] remain white and soft" they are, no doubt, supplanting the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil.

Porter pursues these insights through a wide variety of numerical worlds. He scrutinizes, for example, the connections between economics and engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique, the use of measurement in the pricing of public works at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees, the cult of impersonality among accountants and actuaries, technocratic practices among the French State Engineers, and the rise of cost-benefit analysis within the United States Army Engineers, all to take the measure--to adopt an appropriate metaphor--of the quantitative mentalite.

Here are many detailed insights into the manufacture of modern objectivist cultures. We learn, for instance, of the tensions between judgment and measurement, experience and exactitude in the business of accounting and actuary, and of the links between administrative routine and quantitative methods among the French engineers. We are witness to the struggles between advocates of different mathematical styles at the Ecole des Ponts and to debates over methods of estimating freight and passenger usage of roads. We are shown how cost-benefit analysis was used in the 1936 Flood Control Act in the United States and the ways in which the Corps of Engineers pushed for standardization in debates over electrical utilities and railroads, and within the Agriculture Department and the Bureau of Reclamation. All go to show that the "transformation of cost-benefit analysis into a universal standard of rationality . . . cannot be attributed to the megalomania of experts, but rather to bureaucratic conflict in a context of overwhelming public distrust."

The culture of mechanical objectivism--if Porter is to be believed--is the outgrowth, not simply of a lust for scientific precision, but of political pressure and administrative infighting.

We return now to the moral complexions of objectivity. To begin with, as Porter reminds us, objectivity as impersonality (if not as truth) has long been valued less for its epistemological value than for its moral virtue. Figures like Karl Pearson and Francis Galton welcomed the scientific objectivism of number as a successor surrogate to religion since it would "expel the demon of interestedness." According to Porter, quantification is intimately bound up with the issue of trust. Indeed, his scrutiny of the use of numbers by accountants, actuaries, and engineers is subsumed under the rubric "Technologies of Trust."

This issue is something that has begun to receive serious scholarly attention by historians of science like Steven Shapin, who have called attention to the role of trust in the making of science. For science is not simply about knowing nature; it is about knowing people and about whom to trust. According to Shapin, the bulk of scientific knowledge--and indeed, knowledge more generally--is held not by observation or demonstration, but by courtesy. Plausibility, to put it another way, is grounded in decisions each of us routinely makes about just who is a trustworthy witness.

Statistical practices constitute a significant response to precisely this species of problem. They are designed to overcome the epistemological quandary raised by "distance and distrust." For by employing well-drilled statisticians, or by using tried and trusted impersonal methods, information producers are enabled to procure data about places and people spatially distant, removed from the direct gaze of the information-monger. Statistical enumeration--to put it another way--is designed to overcome geography, to obliterate the space between here and there. Only then can college administrators compare standardized grade scores from Boston and Seattle without any local knowledge of either region. Local fealty can thereby be bypassed and national bureaucracy proceed unimpeded. Small wonder that Porter pauses to ask the question, "Is mechanical objectivity capable of replacing expert knowledge in human societies and politics?"

If the story that Porter has to tell is even in the neighborhood of a correct analysis, then there are many lessons to be learned. Ironically, even while our social masters embrace pan-objectification, we are increasingly discovering that in the world of science, cognitive problems are frequently resolved by negotiation, not quantification. The meaning of theories and abstract matters of knowledge are "settled through close personal contact." Nonetheless, there seem to me to be good grounds for suggesting that, to the extent we cultivate moral calculus, mechanize judgment, and enthrone the mere measurable, we suppress human agency.

Just how the theology of the image of God might equip us to deal with the challenges and opportunities posed by modernity's statistical turn is a subject worthy of deeper consideration. For, after all, statistics do not bleed. And they flourish in places where negotiation is suspect and trust is in short supply.

The ideology of rigor can too easily become the idolatry of rigor. Let us recall that eighteenth-century advocates of quantification, such as de Condillac, were entirely prepared to sacrifice substantive understanding on the altar of clarity. A parsimonious concern with mere measurement can subvert any effort to grasp the true nature of things and leave us content with anorexic knowledge lacking depth and texture.

And there are lessons here too for efforts to relate Christianity to the world of scientific scholarship. Many devout Christian believers have also worshiped at the sacred shrine of scientific objectivity--those craving for a scientific theology, those applying scientific methodology to the study of Scripture, those longing for a scientific benediction on their doctrine of Creation.

The interest-laden nature of the pursuit of impartiality, the desire for objectivity, and the "trust in numbers" should certainly not lead us to jettison our search for truth by all the best scientific methods available. But it should temper the triumphalism of those claiming that they alone enjoy the blessing of scientific objectivity. In my view, arguments about the truth or falsity of particular claims--while vitally important in themselves--nonetheless can too readily deflect attention away from the uses of knowledge, the rhetoric of representation, the interests of scientists, and the social authority of knowledge producers. Valuable time could well be spent, both by Christian creationists and evolutionary naturalists, to take just one example, pondering their own rhetorical strategies.

It is all too easy, of course, to set about unmasking somebody else's discourse, to expose their claim to truth as a veiled will to power, to uncover hidden nastiness in their projects. But if we fail to engage in self-criticism, it is just possible that we will secure socially sanctioned objectivity at the cost of wisdom.

-David Livingstone is a professor in the School of Geosciences at the Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland.

1. The Times, Saturday 11 May, 1996, p. 10.

2. F. Galton, "Cutting a Round Cake on Scientific Principles," Nature, Vol. 75 (1906), p. 173.

3. F. Galton, "Statistical Enquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer," Fortnightly Review, Vol. 12 (1872), pp. 125-135.

4. F. Galton, Memories of My Life (London, 1908), pp. 315-316. On his beauty scale, London scored the highest, Aberdeen the lowest!

5. See discussions in John Irvine, Ian Miles, and Jeff Evans, eds., Demystifying Social Statistics (London, 1979).

Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.