STATISTICAL LAW AND HUMAN FREEDOM

Abstract

This chapter evaluates the criticism of statistics. Already in the early nineteenth century, the statistical approach was attacked on the ground that mere statistical tables cannot demonstrate causality, or that mathematical probability presupposes the occurrence of events wholly by chance. The intent of these early critics was not to suggest the inadequacy of causal laws in social science, but to reject the scientific validity of statistics. The new interpretation of statistics that emerged during the 1860s and 1870s was tied to a view of society in which variation was seen as much more vital. Statistical determinism became untenable precisely when social thinkers who used numbers became unwilling to overlook the diversity of the component individuals in society, and hence denied that regularities in the collective society could justify any particular conclusions about its members. These social discussions on natural science and philosophy bore fruit in the growing interest in the analysis of variation evinced by the late-century mathematical statisticians. To be sure, Francis Galton gave little attention to the debates on human freedom, but Francis Edgeworth was closely familiar with them, and Wilhelm Lexis's important work on dispersion can only be understood in the context of this tradition.