inconvenience

[ish mailian]

from Menand's _The Metaphysical Club_

p. 177  The law of errors arose out of two closely related bodies of
thought, both of which had their origins in the seventeenth century:
probability theory, which sought to understand chance events, such as
throwing dice, and statistics, which sought to measure large-scale
fluctuating phenomena, such as birthrates and life expectancies.
These two lines of thought converged around 1800 in the field of
astronomy.



p. 186  What made the law of errors so important to nineteenth-century
thought, though, was not only its application to the study of nature.
The realization that even “errors,” even the unpredictable and
accidental fluctuations that make phenomena seem to deviate from their
normal “laws,” are themselves bound by a statistical law thrilled
scientists.  But what captivated, and sometimes appalled, the popular
imagination was the application of the law of errors—hinted at by
Laplace in his discussion of dead letters and marriage rates—to the
study of human beings.  What scandalized people about the Peirces’
testimony in the Howland will case was their apparent reduction of a
human activity—signing one’s name—to a set of numbers.  For in the
1860s such reductions had a particular philosophical implication.
They were understood to point toward determinism.



p. 195  Charles Peirce was an enemy of economic individualism.  He was
also an enemy of determinism.  He did not believe that evidence of
statistical regularity licensed individual self-interest, and he did
not believe that the universe is a machine.  He thought that life is
everywhere, and that life means spontaneity.  He believed that the
universe is charged with indeterminacy; like his father, though he
also believed that the universe makes sense, and he devoted his life
to devising a cosmology that would show how both of those things—the
indeterminacy and the intelligibility—could be the case.  He never
abandoned his father’s faith that the world is constructed to be known
by the mind—that, in Benjamin Peirce’s words, “the two are wonderfully
matched.”  But he worked with scientific concepts predicated on a
fundamentally different conception of the universe.