ABSTRACT
Philosophical skepticism trades on two maneuvers: a focus on the worst case, and a demand that any method of forming belief find the truth in all logically possible circumstances. When action must be taken, skepticism is in league with obscurantism, with know-nothingism, and in opposition to forces that are more optimistic about the information that inquiry can provide to judgment. In this century, the principal tool of scientific optimism—although not always of social optimism—has been social statistics. Social statistics promised something less than a method of inquiry that is reliable in every possible circumstance, but something more than sheer ignorance; it promised methods that, under explicit and often plausible assumptions, but not in every logically possible circumstance, converge to the truth, whatever that may be, methods whose liability to error in the short run can be quantified and measured.
