ABSTRACT
Data analysis is impossible without presuppositions; it assumes world knowledge. The difference between statistics and arithmetic is that statistical analysis is about data and arithmetic is about numbers. Data are (usually) numbers with reference to some part of the real world. Consequently data analysis is not possible unless we ask questions of the data; about how they were gathered, what was measured, what measurement scale was used, and what choices were made in order to produce the data to hand.
