Books by Lorraine Daston

What did it mean to be reasonable in the Age of Reason? Classical probabilists from Jakob Bernouli through Pierre Simon Laplace intended their theory as an answer to this question--as "e;nothing more at bottom than good sense reduced to a calculus,"e; in Laplace's words. In terms that can be easily grasped by nonmathematicians, Lorraine Daston demonstrates how this view profoundly shaped the internal development of probability theory and defined its applications.

Observation is the most pervasive and fundamental practice of all the modern sciences, both natural and human. This collection offers an examination of the history of scientific observation in its own right, as both epistemic category and scientific practice.