Stigler, Stephen M. (1986). The History of Statistics. The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900. Cambridge: Belknap Harvard. 2003.
Il programma del libro, dichiarato nell’introduzione, è molto chiaro:
Statistics, as we now understand the term, has come to be recognized as a separate field only in the twentieth century. But this book is a history of statistics before 1900. Thus my subject is not the entire development of a single discipline but rather the story of how that discipline was formed, of how a logic common to all empirical science emerged from the interplay of mathematical concepts and the needs of several applied sciences (p. 1).
Non che Stigler non mantenga la promessa. Ma la mantiene con un’attenzione ossessiva agli aspetti formali, alle dimostrazioni matematiche. Chiaramente innamorato della sua materia, abbandona spesso la storia delle idee – l’aspetto per me più interessante – per soffermarsi sui passaggi e le dimostrazioni matematiche, talora presentate due volte (una con il formalismo dell’epoca e una in versione moderna).
Perciò, mi sento di raccomandarlo agli addetti ai lavori, e non ai semplici curiosi. Un trattato tecnico, non un’opera di divulgazione: detto da me, è una critica severa.
Non di meno, il libro contiene alcune perle. Questa, per me, è la migliore:
Observations and statistics agree in being quantities grouped about a Mean; they differ, in that the Mean of observations is real, of statistics is fictitious. The mean of observations is a cause, as it were the source from which diverging errors emanate. The mean of statistics is a description, a representative quantity put for a whole group, the best representative of the group, that quantity which, if we must in practice put one quantity for many, minimizes the error unavoidably attending such practice. Thus measurement by the reduction of which we ascertain a real time, number, distance are observations. Returns of prices, exports and imports, legitimate and illegitimate marriages or births and so forth, the averages of which constitute the premisese of practical reasoning, are statistics. In short observations are different copies of one original; statistics are different originals affording one “generic portrait”. Different measurements of the same man are observations; but measurements of different men, grouped around l’homme moyen, are prima facie at least statistics [Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro. 1885. “Observations and statistics: an essay on the theory of errors and the first principles of statistics”. Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 14: 138-169] (p. 309)
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