A Proof Above All: How the Introduction of Statistics Changed the Standard of Rationality. Cognitive History of 1864-1931 Poland.
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Following Hacking (2016), the main goal of this talk is to trace the mechanisms in which emergence and proliferation of statistics shapes cognitive history (Dunér & Ahlberger 2019). In order to do so, I discuss the case of late 19th/ early 20th century statistics in Poland and defend two major claims.
Firstly, I argue that the introduction of modern statistics with its quantitative concepts and tools (Stigler 2002) was a major component in the project of Weberian modernization. This claim is of course already present in the literature, but was so far mostly limited to well-developed Western states, such as Great Britain (Crooke & O’Hara 2012) or Germany (Tooze 2001). This process is much less understood in the case of underdeveloped countries and the instance of Poland serves as a nuanced complement to the received view. I show that the mechanism in question happened more drastically on the outskirts of the mainstream scientific network and was driven by different actors (Latour 2007), as the scientific elites intentionally strived for the introduction of statistical ideas to (in their minds) catch up in the modernization process.
Secondly (and more importantly), however, I argue that this process is best understood not as a just social or political phenomenon, but a cognitive one. Specifically, the most profound impact of the rapid proliferation of statistics was what I dub – following thefootsteps of Daston & Galison (2021) and Renn (2015)– a ‘shift in the standard ofrationality’. It denotes a major and relatively abrupt change in how quantitative thinking became a major component of scientific knowledge-production and but also its social impact and acceptance. In this case what starts as growing ‘trust in numbers’ (Porter 1996) becomes more akin to a genuine epistemic rupturę (Bachelard 1986). At the crux of that issue lies the torrential introduction of numbers (Crook & O’Hara 2012), datasets and metrics that quickly became an indispensable tool for establishing both scientific and non-scientific facts in the public discourse, but even more so – for convincing the adversaries. In rapidly modernizing Poland this process quickly became so deeply rooted that social and economical arguments were even sometimes labelled as ‘proofs’ or ‘calculations’ (Ostasiewicz 2012). In order to examine this process that I call ‘convincing without convincing’ I analyze three major public debates ranging in their timescale and subject matter: discussion on ‘belatedness of Galicia’ (1888), the discourse on ‘social degeneration’ (1878) and the ‘intellectualist conundrum’ (debate on the impact of education on morality of 1880s). These consequential events serve as exemplars of changes in what wasconsidered rationally-motivated at the time. This cognitive shift became fully visible with the birth of the Second Polish Republic and its fully professional statistical institutions (e.g. Socio- Economic Institute) and influential figures, such as Oskar Lange, Michał Kalecki, or Ludwik Landau (Mazurek 2019).