ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses educational evaluation as strictly related to the complex tangle of governmental processes that develops around the interrelationship between the problem of the government of population, the foundation of the modern state, statistics and expertise. Looking specifically at the epistemic dimension, it recognises the inescapable relation that educational evaluation has with mathematical formalisation and numbers and the tension towards the application of quantification to education as empirical domain. However, this chapter invites the readers to reflect on the hypothesis that the historical a priori of educational evaluation is not identifiable in its relation to mathematics and numbers. Rather, the constitutive possibility for educational evaluation is related to the rise of human sciences as an answer to the problem of governing man and controlling the uncertainty inherent in human activity. This chapter frames educational evaluation as a mode of inquiry that proceeds through models and/or concepts transferred from biology, political economy and the study of language and, moving from that, pursues the project to establish itself a mathematical formalisation and explores some distinctive empirical manifestations of that mode of being of man which philosophy attempts to conceive at the level of radical finitude.
