Quotations to help thinking about quantitative thinking

1. “Quantification was a way of claiming status… even the social anthropologists counted coconuts” (McCloskey, who, for the avoidance of doubt, was not suggesting this is a good thing!)
2. “Measurements presuppose theories” (Popper)
3. Even when just describing a new dataset  “we cannot avoid applying to it certain abstract ideas, acquired from somewhere or other but certainly not just from the new observations alone.” (Freud)
4. Quantification is not something “that can effectively be sought by measuring” (Kuhn)

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Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2013, December 16). Quotations to help thinking about quantitative thinking [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/quotations-to-help-thinking-about-quantitative-thinking/

This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀