Measuring and Reasoning: Numerical Inference in the Sciences - Hardcover

Bookstein, Fred L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107024153 ISBN 13: 9781107024151

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2014

Synopsis

In Measuring and Reasoning, Fred L. Bookstein examines the way ordinary arithmetic and numerical patterns are translated into scientific understanding, showing how the process relies on two carefully managed forms of argument: * Abduction: the generation of new hypotheses to accord with findings that were surprising on previous hypotheses, and * Consilience: the confirmation of numerical pattern claims by analogous findings at other levels of measurement. These profound principles include an understanding of the role of arithmetic and, more importantly, of how numerical patterns found in one study can relate to numbers found in others. They are illustrated through numerous classic and contemporary examples arising in disciplines ranging from atomic physics through geosciences to social psychology. The author goes on to teach core techniques of pattern analysis, including regression and correlation, normal distributions, and inference, and shows how these accord with abduction and consilience, first in the simple setting of one dependent variable and then in studies of image data for complex or interdependent systems. More than 200 figures and diagrams illuminate the text. The book can be read with profit by any student of the empirical natural or social sciences and by anyone concerned with how scientists persuade those of us who are not scientists why we should credit the most important claims about scientific facts or theories.

About this title

Book Description

This exploration of empirical inference in science ranges over topics as diverse as the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, Peirce's concept of abduction, multiple regression, and the analysis of patterns in astrophysics. At its heart is a formal description of the process by which scientific measurements support convincing explanations of the world around us.

About the Author

Fred L. Bookstein is Professor of Statistics at the University of Washington, Seattle; Professor of Morphometrics, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, Austria; and an emeritus Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Michigan. Since 1977 he has produced some 300 books, chapters, articles, and videotapes on various aspects of these methods and their applications in studies of normal and abnormal craniofacial growth in humans and other mammals, studies in the neuroanatomy and behavior of schizophrenia and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, and evolutionary studies of hominids and ammonoids. He is especially interested in how statistical diagrams can convey the valid numerical patterns that characterize complicated systems like continental drift or fetal alcohol brain damage to the broad modern public. The figures in this book include many of his current favorites along these lines.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1107024153
• ISBN 13: 9781107024151
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 559