Foreword: The Peculiar Meanings of Data -- Chapter 1: Considering Data: Critique and Method -- Chapter 2: Data Arithmetic, Ratios and Mechanical Reasoning in the 17th Century -- Chapter 3: Analytical Probability, Averages and Data Distributions in the 19th Century -- Chapter 4: Idols, Paradigms and Specters in Data Sciences -- List of illustations.-List of references.-General index.

This book examines several epistemological regimes in studies of numerical data over the last four centuries. It distinguishes these regimes and mobilises questions present in the philosophy of science, sociology and historical works throughout the 20th century. Attention is given to the skills of scholars and their methods, their assumptions, and the socio-historical conditions that made calculations and their interpretations possible. In doing so, questions posed as early as Émile Durkheim’s and Ernst Cassirer’s ones are revisited and the concept of symbolic form is put to the test in this particular survey, conducted over long period of time. Although distinct from a methodological and epistemological point of view, today these regimes may be found together in the toolbox of statisticians and those who comment on their conclusions. As such, the book is addressed to social scientists and historians and all those who are interested in numerical productions. This book is a translation of an original French edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.