精确的价值观检验了精确是如何在西方文化中占据如此突出的地位的。数值的值是多少？从18世纪末一直到20世纪，本书中的文章支持这样一种观点，即中央集权的国家——其管理贸易、税收和军队的官僚机构越来越广泛——以及大型商业企业——其标准化和大规模生产的要求——是数字精度的主要推动者。利用现有资源，科学家和工程师与国家和行业建立了共生关系，这反过来又导致在不断扩大的自然和社会世界领域采取越来越精细的措施。因此，这本书的核心是对数字和仪器跨越文化和物质边界的能力的探讨。
许多论文将注意力集中在关于支持特定索赔的特定类型测量的重要性和可信度的分歧上，比如法国人口的测量、铜的电阻或保险公司的偿付能力。同时，它们也体现了精确价值观的深厚文化品格。该书的作者包括肯·奥尔德、格雷姆·J·N·古代、扬·戈林斯基、弗雷德里克·L·霍姆斯、凯瑟琳·M·奥列斯科、西奥多·M·波特、安德里亚·罗斯诺克、西蒙·谢弗、乔治·斯威特南、安德鲁·沃里克和诺顿·怀斯。
The Values of Precision
The Values of Precision examines how exactitude has come to occupy such a prominent place in Western culture. What has been the value of numerical values? Beginning with the late eighteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, the essays in this volume support the view that centralizing states–with their increasingly widespread bureaucracies for managing trade, taxation, and armies–and large-scale commercial enterprises–with their requirements for standardization and mass production–have been the major promoters of numerical precision. Taking advantage of the resources available, scientists and engineers have entered a symbiotic relationship with state and industry, which in turn has led to increasingly refined measures in ever-widening domains of the natural and social world. At the heart of this book, therefore, is an inquiry into the capacity of numbers and instruments to travel across boundaries of culture and materials.
Many of the papers focus attention on disagreements about the significance and the credibility of particular sorts of measurements deployed to support particular claims, as in the measures of the population of France, the electrical resistance of copper, or the solvency of insurance companies. At the same time they display the deeply cultural character of precision values. Contributors to the volume include Ken Alder, Graeme J. N. Gooday, Jan Golinski, Frederic L. Holmes, Kathryn M. Olesko, Theodore M. Porter, Andrea Rusnock, Simon Schaffer, George Sweetnam, Andrew Warwick, and M. Norton Wise.
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