Somewhere in the vastness of the scholarly literature there exists a sound, if not complete, history of the reception of statistical inference, especially regression, across the social sciences in the 20th century. I have not found it and would appreciate pointers, though I can only offer acknowledgments in return. If the history end neither with "thus did our fathers raise fertile gardens of rigor in the sterile deserts of anecdata" nor "thus did a dark age of cruel scientism overwhelm all, save a few lonely bastions of humanity", so much the better.
(I specifically mean the 20th century and not the 19th, and statistical inference and not "statistics" in the sense of aggregated numerical data. Erich Lehmann's "Some Standard Statistical Models" is in the right direction, but too focused inwards on statistics.)
Posted at March 17, 2010 13:30 | permanent link