Making Comparisons Count

Making Comparisons Count

Author: Ruth Chang

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9780815337829

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First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.


A Philosophy of Comparisons

A Philosophy of Comparisons

Author: Hartmut von Sass

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-09-09

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 135018439X

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Comparing is one of the most essential practices, in our everyday life as well as in science and humanities. In this in-depth philosophical analysis of the structure, practice and ethics of comparative procedures, Hartmut von Sass expands on the significance of comparison. Elucidating the ramified structure of comparing, von Sass suggests a typology of comparisons before introducing the notion of comparative injustice and the limits of comparisons. He elaborates on comparing as practice by relating comparing to three relative practices – orienting, describing, and expressing oneself – to unfold some of the most important chapters of what might be called comparativism. This approach allows von Sass to clarify the idea of the incomparable, distinguish between different versions of incomparability and shed light on important ethical aspects of comparisons today. Confronting the claim that we are living in an age of comparisons, his book is an important contribution to ideas surrounding all-encompassing measurements and scalability and their critique.


Making Numbers Count

Making Numbers Count

Author: Chip Heath

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-01-11

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1982165456

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A clear, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to communicating and understanding numbers and data—from bestselling business author Chip Heath. How much bigger is a billion than a million? Well, a million seconds is twelve days. A billion seconds is…thirty-two years. Understanding numbers is essential—but humans aren’t built to understand them. Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five—anything from six to infinity was known as “lots.” While the numbers in our world have gotten increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. How can we translate millions and billions and milliseconds and nanometers into things we can comprehend and use? Author Chip Heath has excelled at teaching others about making ideas stick and here, in Making Numbers Count, he outlines specific principles that reveal how to translate a number into our brain’s language. This book is filled with examples of extreme number makeovers, vivid before-and-after examples that take a dry number and present it in a way that people click in and say “Wow, now I get it!” You will learn principles such as: -SIMPLE PERSPECTIVE CUES: researchers at Microsoft found that adding one simple comparison sentence doubled how accurately users estimated statistics like population and area of countries. -VIVIDNESS: get perspective on the size of a nucleus by imagining a bee in a cathedral, or a pea in a racetrack, which are easier to envision than “1/100,000th of the size of an atom.” -CONVERT TO A PROCESS: capitalize on our intuitive sense of time (5 gigabytes of music storage turns into “2 months of commutes, without repeating a song”). -EMOTIONAL MEASURING STICKS: frame the number in a way that people already care about (“that medical protocol would save twice as many women as curing breast cancer”). Whether you’re interested in global problems like climate change, running a tech firm or a farm, or just explaining how many Cokes you’d have to drink if you burned calories like a hummingbird, this book will help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our world—allowing us to bring more data, more naturally, into decisions in our schools, our workplaces, and our society.


Practices of Comparing

Practices of Comparing

Author: Angelika Epple

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2020-06-22

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 3839451663

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Practices of comparing shape how we perceive, organize, and change the world. Supposedly innocent, practices of comparing play a decisive role in forming categories, boundaries, and hierarchies; but they can also give an impetus to question and change such structures. Like almost no other human practice, comparing pervades all social, political, economic, and cultural spheres. This volume outlines the program of a new research agenda that places comparative practices at the center of an interdisciplinary exploration. Its contributions combine case studies with overarching systematic considerations. They show what insights can be gained and which further questions arise when one makes a seemingly trivial practice - comparing - the subject of in-depth research.


Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason

Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason

Author: Ruth Chang

Publisher:

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

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Can quite different values be rationally weighed against one another? Can the value of one thing always be ranked as greater than, equal to, or less than the value of something else? If the answer to these questions is no, then in what areas do we find commensurability and comparability unavailable? And what are the implications for moral and legal decision making? This book struggles with these questions, and arrives at distinctly different answers."


Making It Count

Making It Count

Author: Stanley Lieberson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1987-03-16

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0520908422

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This title reexamines and reconsiders the model of empirical research underlying most empirical work. The goal is neither a whitewash nor capital punishment, but rather it is to reform and mold empirical research into an activity that contributes as much as possible to a rigorous understanding of society. Without worrying about defining science or even determining the essence of the scientific enterprise, the goal is one that pools together logical thinking and empirically determined information. One of the fundamental issues to be addressed in this volume: Are there questions currently studied that are basically unanswerable even if the investigator had ideal nonexperimental data? If so, what are the alternative questions that can be dealt with successfully by empirical social research, and how should they be approached? In the chapters ahead, it will be important to keep in mind this doctrine of the undoable. Of course, one cannot simply mutter "undoable" when a difficult obstacle is encountered, turn off the computer, and look in the want ads for a new job—or at least a new task. Instead, it means considering if there is some inherent logical reason or sociological force that makes certain empirical questions unanswerable. There are four types of undoable questions to consider: those that are inherently impossible; those that are premature; those that are overly complicated; and those that empirical and theoretical knowledge have nullified.


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Author: New York (State). Dept. of Agriculture and Markets

Publisher:

Published: 1918

Total Pages: 822

ISBN-13:

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Incommensurability and its Implications for Practical Reasoning, Ethics and Justice

Incommensurability and its Implications for Practical Reasoning, Ethics and Justice

Author: Martijn Boot

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-06-27

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1786602296

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If values conflict and rival human interests clash we often have to weigh them against each other. However, under particular conditions incommensurability prevents the assignment of determinable and impartial weights. In those cases an objective balance does not exist. The original thesis of this book sheds new light on aspects of incommensurability and its implications for public decision-making, ethics and justice. Martijn Boot analyzes a number of previously ignored or unrecognized concepts, such as ‘incomplete comparability’, ‘incompletely justified choice’, ‘indeterminateness’ and ‘ethical deficit’ – concepts that are essential for comprehending problems of incommensurability. Apart from problematic implications, incommensurability has also favourable consequences. It creates room for autonomous rational choices that are not dictated by reason. Besides, insight into incommensurability promotes recognition of different possible rankings of universally valid but sometimes conflicting human values. This book avoids unnecessary technical language and is accessible not only for specialists but for a large audience of philosophers, ethicists, political theorists, economists, lawyers and interested persons without specialized knowledge.