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  1. Trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life.Theodore M. Porter - 1995 - Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
    What accounts for the prestige of quantitative methods? The usual answer is that quantification is desirable in social investigation as a result of its successes in science. Trust in Numbers questions whether such success in the study of stars, molecules, or cells should be an attractive model for research on human societies, and examines why the natural sciences are highly quantitative in the first place. Theodore Porter argues that a better understanding of the attractions of quantification in business, government, and (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Are RCTs the gold standard?Nancy Cartwright - 2007 - In Causal powers: what are they? why do we need them? what can be done with them and what cannot? Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics and Political Science.
    The claims of RCTs to be the gold standard rest on the fact that the ideal RCT is a deductive method: if the assumptions of the test are met, a positive result implies the appropriate causal conclusion. This is a feature that RCTs share with a variety of other methods, which thus have equal claim to being a gold standard. This paper describes some of these other deductive methods and also some useful non-deductive methods, including the hypothetico-deductive method. It argues (...)
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  • Objectivity.Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison - 2007 - Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books. Edited by Peter Galison.
    Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences--and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences--from anatomy to crystallography--are those featured in (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas About Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference.Ian Hacking - 1975 - Cambridge University Press.
    Historical records show that there was no real concept of probability in Europe before the mid-seventeenth century, although the use of dice and other randomizing objects was commonplace. Ian Hacking presents a philosophical critique of early ideas about probability, induction, and statistical inference and the growth of this new family of ideas in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Hacking invokes a wide intellectual framework involving the growth of science, economics, and the theology of the period. He argues that the (...)
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  • The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life.Gerd Gigerenzer, Zeno Swijtink, Theodore Porter, Lorraine Daston, John Beatty & Lorenz Kruger - 1990 - Cambridge University Press.
    The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last 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 in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Are rcts the gold standard?Nancy Cartwright - 2007 - Biosocieties 1 (1):11-20.
    The claims of randomized controlled trials to be the gold standard rest on the fact that the ideal RCT is a deductive method: if the assumptions of the test are met, a positive result implies the appropriate causal conclusion. This is a feature that RCTs share with a variety of other methods, which thus have equal claim to being a gold standard. This article describes some of these other deductive methods and also some useful non-deductive methods, including the hypothetico-deductive method. (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Evidence‐based policy : where is our theory of evidence?N. Cartwright, A. Goldfinch & J. Howick - 2009 - Journal of Children’s Services 4 (4):6--14.
    This article critically analyses the concept of evidence in evidence‐based policy, arguing that there is a key problem: there is no existing practicable theory of evidence, one which is philosophically‐grounded and yet applicable for evidence‐based policy. The article critically considers both philosophical accounts of evidence and practical treatments of evidence in evidence‐based policy. It argues that both fail in different ways to provide a theory of evidence that is adequate for evidence‐based policy. The article contributes to the debate about how (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Are RCTs the gold standard?Nancy Cartwright - 2007 - In Causal powers: what are they? why do we need them? what can be done with them and what cannot? Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics and Political Science.
    The claims of RCTs to be the gold standard rest on the fact that the ideal RCT is a deductive method: if the assumptions of the test are met, a positive result implies the appropriate causal conclusion. This is a feature that RCTs share with a variety of other methods, which thus have equal claim to being a gold standard. This paper describes some of these other deductive methods and also some useful non-deductive methods, including the hypothetico-deductive method. It argues (...)
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  • Evidence-based policy: where is our theory of evidence?Nancy Cartwright - unknown
    This paper critically analyses the concept of evidence in evidence-based-policy arguing that there is key problem: that there is no existing practicable theory of evidence, one which is philosophically grounded and yet applicable for evidencebased policy. The paper critically considers both philosophical accounts of evidence and practical treatments of evidence in evidence-based-policy. It argues that both fail in different ways to provide a theory of evidence that is adequate for evidence-basedpolicy. The paper is a valuable contribution to the part of (...)
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  • The Emergence of Probability.Susan Khin Zaw - 1976 - Philosophical Quarterly 26 (103):186-187.
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  • The objects of social science.Eleonora Montuschi - 2003 - New York: Continuum.
    Using a range of examples from specific social sciences, the book both identifies the practical and theoretical procedures involved in the identification of the ...
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  • (1 other version)The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference.Ian Hacking - 1984 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Cambridge : Cambridge university press.
    Ian Hacking here presents a philosophical critique of early ideas about probability, induction and statistical inference and the growth of this new family of ...
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  • A Dutch treat: randomized controlled experimentation and the case of heroin-maintenance in the Netherlands.Trudy Dehue - 2002 - History of the Human Sciences 15 (2):75-98.
    In 1995, the Dutch Minister of Health proposed that a randomized clinical trial (RCT) with heroin-maintenance for severe abusers be conducted. It took nearly four years of lengthy debates before the Dutch Parliament consented to the plan. Apart from the idea of prescribing heroin, the minister and her scientific advisers had to defend the quite high material and non-material costs that would arise from employing the randomized controlled design. They argued that the RCT represented the truly scientific approach and was (...)
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