ABSTRACT
This chapter considers to do with the political significance of statistics as a way of representing knowledge of the political world, or, put more precisely, with the authority underlying the facticity of the facts of statistical data. Social scientists, and perhaps political scientists in particular, may regard such debates as little more than the professional squabbles of disciplines that, focused as they suppose on the ephemera of texts, have little to do with real politics in the real world. Statistical science, the introduction continues, is distinctive both for its end in view and for its range of concerns. The peculiarity of statistical science, however, is that it proceeds wholly by the accumulation and comparison of facts, and does not admit of any kind of speculation. Such demonstrations, of course, did not yet entail such mathematical techniques as regressions, chi-squares, correlation coefficients, factor analysis, or Bayesian probabilities.
