Limits of the Numerical: The Abuses and Uses of Quantification

"This timely collection by a diverse group of humanists challenges undue reverence or skepticism toward quantification and shows how it can be a force for good in our social lives despite its many abuses. The book focuses on quantification in climate, higher education, and health: the role of numerical estimates and targets in explaining and planning for climate change; the quantification of outcomes in teaching and research; and numbers representing health, the effectiveness of medical interventions, and well-being more broadly. One might assume that quantification would be a force for good in climate science, a force for bad in higher education, and a mixed bag in healthcare contexts. The authors complicate those narratives, uncovering, for example, epistemic problems with some core numbers in climate science. But their theme is less the problems revealed by case studies than the methodological issues common to them all. Only by stepping outside quantitative frameworks, they argue, can one appreciate what those frameworks do, how they do it, and whether they do it badly or well"--
This collection examines the uses of quantification in climate science, higher education, and health.   Numbers are both controlling and fragile. They drive public policy, figuring into everything from college rankings to vaccine efficacy rates. At the same time, they are frequent objects of obfuscation, manipulation, or outright denial. This timely collection by a diverse group of humanists and social scientists challenges undue reverence or skepticism toward quantification and offers new ideas about how to harmonize quantitative with qualitative forms of knowledge.   Limits of the Numerical focuses on quantification in several contexts: climate change; university teaching and research; and health, medicine, and well-being more broadly. This volume shows the many ways that qualitative and quantitative approaches can productively interact—how the limits of the numerical can be overcome through equitable partnerships with historical, institutional, and philosophical analysis. The authors show that we can use numbers to hold the powerful to account, but only when those numbers are themselves democratically accountable.