The Taming of Chance

By Ian Hacking,

Book cover of The Taming of Chance

Book description

In this important study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as the best-selling The Emergence of Probability. Professor Hacking shows how by the late-nineteenth century it became possible to think of statistical patterns as…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Taming of Chance as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Are you stuck on a single sentence that keeps expanding but goes nowhere? Then tame it by cutting it down and finishing it off now. Ian Hacking is the master of the subject-verb-predicate sentence in historical writing. And this book, in addition to being a model of stylistic clarity, changes how we think about modernity, mathematics, danger, and risk. You’ll never be afraid of being clear again.

From Joseph's list on against writers’ block.

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