Trust in Numbers

Theodore M Porter Princeton University Press, pp 310 ISBN 0 691 03776 0 Few of us probably think of science as a solution to the problem of trust. Yet concepts such as objectivity and validity are the mark of a society that is no longer organised around personal knowledge and local communities. Such a society calls for a type of knowledge capable of seeming to be independent of particular people. This is science. As we all now know, science is socially constructed: who scientists are and where and when they live help to explain the science they do. Yet, as Theodore M Porter, a historian of science, rightly points out in Trust in Numbers, understanding that science is a social product in no …