The Taming of Chance

aw_product_id: 
29898500845
merchant_image_url: 
https://cdn.waterstones.com/bookjackets/large/9780/5213/9780521388849.jpg
merchant_category: 
Books
search_price: 
22.99
book_author_name: 
Ian Hacking
book_type: 
Paperback
publisher: 
Cambridge University Press
published_date: 
31/08/1990
isbn: 
9780521388849
Merchant Product Cat path: 
Books > Politics, Society & Education > Society & culture > Cultural studies > History of ideas
specifications: 
Ian Hacking|Paperback|Cambridge University Press|31/08/1990
Merchant Product Id: 
9780521388849
Book Description: 
In this important study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as the best-selling The 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. In the same period the idea of human nature was displaced by a model of normal people with laws of dispersion. These two parallel transformations fed into each other, so that chance made the world seem less capricious: it was legitimated because it brought order out of chaos. Combining detailed scientific historical research with characteristic philosophic breadth and verve, The Taming of Chance brings out the relations between philosophy, the physical sciences, mathematics and the development of social institutions, and provides a unique and authoritative analysis of the 'probabilisation' of the western world.

Graphic Design by Ishmael Annobil /  Web Development by Ruzanna Hovasapyan