ABSTRACT
The question raised by the editors of the present book concerns the image that, at given times, mathematicians had of their science, its methods and status, at the level of the organization of knowledge as well as within society. This chapter attempts to answer this question for the case of statistics during a period spanning approximately a hundred years up to the 1930s, corresponding to what has been called the ‘probabilistic revolution’ [Krüger & al., 1987]. But in order to sketch out an answer, what is meant by an ‘image of a scientific field’ has first to be specified.
