ABSTRACT
The category of ‘information’, as the refined product of the data, can also be useful in the analysis of purely theoretical or mathematical sciences. The situation is no different in a descriptive science, where the data is found rather than manufactured. In sciences dealing with large collections of different objects, noticeably the descriptive sciences, the need for such tools is particularly strong, and there will develop entire sub-disciplines devoted to their production. The abuses of statistics are again the most notorious example of this; but even in descriptive sciences, the uncritical use of handbook information, which is always incomplete, obsolescent and not quite fitted to the needs of the work at hand, can lead to the most astonishing blunders. The history of statistics, many of whose most powerful techniques were developed in just this way, is a case in point; and many branches of mathematics have evolved directly out of tools designed for special functions in the natural sciences.
