About

Theodore Porter is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA, specializing in the history of science, particularly the human sciences. His work has focused on diverse sites of knowledge-making, including mining boards, statistical agencies, engineering corps, and mental hospitals, with a particular emphasis on the uses of statistics, calculation, numbers, measures, and data. His research explores how quantification and data have historically been intertwined with social, political, and bureaucratic power, emphasizing that effective quantification is a social technology rooted in standards and rules that shape social and scientific practices. Porter's notable contributions include his books 'The Rise of Statistical Thinking' (1986), which examines the development of statistical methods across various fields, and 'Trust in Numbers' (1995), which analyzes the social and political implications of quantification and objectivity in science and public life. His recent work, 'Genetics in the Madhouse' (2018), uncovers a forgotten history of hereditary investigation in asylum reports from the 1820s, highlighting the early use of patient data and phenotypic measures in hereditary science. Throughout his career, Porter has also engaged with the history of social sciences, as seen in his co-authored volume on the history of the social sciences in the modern era, and has explored the life and work of Karl Pearson, emphasizing the complex relationship between scientific method and individual expression. He has advised numerous graduate and undergraduate students on topics related to science, rational leisure, colonial administration, and more, and his future research aims to investigate the contradictions of quantification at the intersection of science, business, and government.

Research topics

• Social Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Mathematics
• Art history
• Linguistics
• History
• Law and economics
• Social psychology
• Law
• Epistemology
• Public relations
• Engineering
• Statistics
• Psychology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Data and Expertise: Some Unanticipated Outcomes

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-04-20

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  Abstract This chapter examines two contrasting versions of expertise. The first, tied to traditions of professional practice in theology, medicine, and law, relies on intuitions derived from generations of experience. Even when they articulate their knowledge as rules, these professionals are likely to insist on the need to interpret these rules in applying them to particular problems and issues. The ideals of the other type of expertise are captured in phrases such as “evidence-based” or, still more austerely, “data-driven,” and often imply a dim view of professional faith in case-based reasoning as casuistry, a self-interested evasion of properly rigorous reasoning. The second type of expertise is embedded in algorithms and, in this chapter, more specifically in rankings. Rankings evaluate institutions using a standardized set of factors. The chapter focuses on the confrontations between these rival forms of expertise, and on the unintended consequences that often arise from efforts to impose numerical standards in place of experience and professional judgment in the design and evaluation of educational programs. Finally, it shows how such confrontations have stimulated the emergence of new forms of quantitative expertise.

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• Foreword

  Berghahn Books · 2022-09-27

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• New historical and philosophical perspectives on quantitative genetics

  Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A · 2022-12-11 · 2 citations

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• Asylum accounts in health and in money

  Manchester University Press eBooks · 2021-01-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The state-supported mental hospitals that sprung up in abundance in Europe and North America from about 1820 became founts of data and statistics. Doctors always insisted that the asylums were medical institutions, and on this basis, they distinguished administrative accounts, denominated in money, from medical tallies of patients. These institutions, however, were seriously expensive, and as they grew, ever more so. Medical administrators could never ignore the relationship of asylum costs to patient outcomes. A few doctors even presented numerical ratios of costs to cures as the ultimate justification for asylum care – though they often added that inadequate or delayed care was disadvantageous even from the standpoint of financial costs alone. Any such calculation depended data routines and conventions of calculations, none of them straightforward. The numbers, in fact, were not always passed by without criticism, especially since the dubious statistics of one institution tended, by comparison, to show others in an unfavourable light. Hence, although these accounts were often presented in reports as routine and unproblematic, and even on occasion as recipes for effortless administration, they were condemned at other moments as groundless or absurd. Such criticism did not owe to any knee-jerk rejection of numbers by doctors. The necessity of statistics in this and other fields of public health was widely acknowledged. The problem was that doctors as well as administrators were almost compelled to look to the accounts for something they could never provide, a numerical basis for fixing the benefits of treatment.

  PublisherDOI

• A Plague of Data

  Harvard Data Science Review · 2021-01-29 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Politics by the Numbers 1

  2021-01-28 · 1 citations

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  The supple rigor of statistical analysis is often held up these days as a scientific alternative to speculation, interpretation, and debate. Although the social and behavioral sciences do indeed provide appropriate material for quantitative investigation, their effectiveness even as tools of expert analysis generally requires an engagement with ordinary human concerns, where mathematical rigor is typically out of reach. Indeed, this wider perspective is likely needed not just for political reasons, as gestures of respect for pluralism and democratic governance, but also because the results of a technical analysis will often be tested and may well be undermined by public reactions. The cooptation of quantified rules, exploiting their vulnerability to unintended consequences, is often more deadly than outright opposition. This chapter is concerned especially with neoliberal systems of incentives, which may be weakened or even collapse in the face of what I call “exploitable ambiguity.” The vulnerabilities of statistics appear in certain characteristic forms that we can examine and sometimes even anticipated. The hazards of ignoring them go beyond their (perhaps) unbecoming hubris. Too narrow a focus on what is “data-driven” and the rejection of alternative forms of expertise is often self-defeating. At the same time, there are important reasons to bring lay citizens into statistical discussions. Effective democracy, in modern times, often requires intelligent attention to statistics, communicating numerical information that matters in an imaginatively accessible form.

  PublisherDOI

• Statistics, Social Science, and the Culture of Objectivity

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2021-01-25 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Contrary to the presumption common in the social sciences, that culture and rationality are in opposition and mutually exclusive of each other - a presumption shared by such different approaches as game theory, rational choice theory and cultural anthropology - , the author emphazises that cultures always have their own rationalities. Standards of reasonableness cannot be thought of as universal, but inevitably reflect culture. Rationality is conditioned, so the author argues, by political forms, economic circumstances, institutions, laws, and customs. This is also true for cultures of objectivity, which are based on the rejection of what is usually conceived of as subjective, linked to emotions and to the personal. The examples of the historic struggles relating to the profession of accountants and the invention of cost-benefit analysis in the United States enable the author to put forward the argument that the quest for objectivity is in itself the cultural expression of a need emerging within societies where political order is not self- evident. Not only bureaucracies impose general standards of administration to avoid severe political conflicts, but various outsiders in different spheres of a society try and manage to gain credibility by escaping what is tainted by personal interest and subjectivity. From this perspective, the author identifies the insistence on impersonal rules in science as a cultural response to conditions of distrust within the corresponding disciplines and in the larger society, and discusses the uses made of statistics in the social sciences characterised by the reduction of quantification to impersonal, unitary, almost mechanical, strategies of analysis.

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• Objectification and Standardization: On the Limits and Effects of Ritually Fixing and Measuring Life

  ANU Open Research (Australian National University) · 2021-03-01 · 17 citations

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  Modes of objectification—different ways of producing and quantifying entities through categories and classes—are part of the cultural infrastructure of any society and any epoch. But we are now in an era that displays a passion for objectification and quantification unparalleled since the beginning of statistics. This volume identifies the most prominent contemporary forms of objectification: in the arts, medicine, finance, identity management, the rhetoric of science as well as the everyday. Different chapters show how these modes of objectification, measurement, and standardization shape the main dimensions of social life: meaning and representation, morality, and notions of thinghood and personhood.
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\nMoreover, quantification, measurement, and standardization are not simply ways of organizing pre-given entities. Rather, they are performative and generative technologies which create institutional objects, give rise to forms of objectivity and carry with them a range of normativities. Hence, the chapters also elaborate on the enduring link between forms of objectification and ritualism. At times, objectification is accomplished and fortified by ritualization. But ritual may also help disrupt the objectified, quantified world which meets resistance in the encounter with the actual fuzziness, flux, and capaciousness of reality. While the volume highlights the growing objectification and standardization of social life on the one hand, on the other it describes resistance to this trend.

  Publisher

• Shaping the Unruly Statistician

  2021-07-22

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Statistics achieved something like disciplinary status in universities as a mathematical and methodological field during the first half of the twentieth century. Yet the experience of statistics stands as a warning against the supposition that scientific knowledge tends naturally to become a discrete discipline. Centuries prior to the consolidation of the mathematical field of statistics, there arose, gradually, a social and administrative field of statistics. Some of the most fundamental concepts and tools of statistical reasoning were first established in this context. Census offices and statistical bureaus devoted to economic, medical, trade, and labor statistics behave in some ways like scientific fields, and in recent times have been more or less closely allied to the mathematical field. From the late nineteenth century, the mathematical field of statistics also came to be seen as a set of concepts and tools for analyzing data in a variety of fields, from engineering, agriculture, education, medicine, and social surveys to astronomy, psychology, economics, sociology, ecology, and physical sciences. All of these gave some heed to the statistical discipline, but none were quite content to mathematicians and methodologists of quantification who dictate the appropriate tools to be used in diverse substantive disciplines. At the same time, input from the substantive disciplines and even from bureaucratic and professional uses has always been important for the shaping of the statistical discipline, which first took shape primarily as a field devoted to problems of evolution, genetics, and eugenics. That history shows a geographical trajectory, arising most prominently in Britain and spreading most readily to other English-language countries.

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• CHAPTER NINE. Is Science Made by Communities?

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2020-09-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Recent grants

• Institutionalized Heredity: Asylums, Statistics, and the Origins of Human Genetics

  NSF · $145k · 2010–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Gerd Gigerenzer

  11 shared

• Zeno G. Swijtink

  10 shared

• Lorenz Krüger

  Augsburg University

  8 shared

• Lorraine Daston

  University of Chicago

  8 shared

• Dorothy Ross

  8 shared

• Margaret Schabas

  University of British Columbia

  6 shared

• Alain Roussillon

  5 shared

• Eileen Janes Yeo

  5 shared