Are Statistics Only Made of Data?

After a dissertation in Mathematical Statistics and another in History and Social Sciences, Éric Brian became a Professor at EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France) and between 2002 and 2018 guest professor at the Institut für Philosphie at the University of Vienna, Austria. At EHESS, he is the current holder of the Chairs “History of Probabilities and Statistics” and “Historical sociology of symbolic instruments”. Since 1995, he is the editor of Revue de Synthèse, a journal at the crossroads of History, Social Sciences and Philosophy created in1900.

• Foreword: The Peculiar Meanings of Data.- Chapter 1: Considering Data: Critique and Method.- Chapter 2: Data Arithmetic, Ratios and Mechanical Reasoning in the 17th Century.- Chapter 3: Analytical Probability, Averages and Data Distributions in the 19th Century.- Chapter 4: Idols, Paradigms and Specters in Data Sciences.- List of illustations.-List of references.-General index.