CRIM 2653 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Ian Hacking
16 Aug 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Social constructionism and empiricist position taken by hacking. Social constructivists (reject notions of objectivity, relativism, etc) His ideas are based on this principle: in statistics, the validity and value of statistics are all front- end loaded. Research and survey designs are all done prior to it. If mistakes are made in the design of the survey, the results will not be valid. The problem is that for most us it"s hard to distinguish between good and bad statistics. (page 4): bad statistics live on, they take on lives of their own . ^-if the results get popular no matter how false their study, it takes away the aura of scientific legitimacy because it"s expressed in numbers. It would be statistically flawed in a number of ways (muslim example) People generate numbers to justify their ideologies and ideological positions, that doesn"t mean that it is true. If the premises and designs are flawed, the results will be flawed.
