ABSTRACT
This chapter is intended to serve as a conceptual and historical backdrop to the discussions of particular ethical issues and quantitative methods in the chapters that follow in this Handbook. Before we focus more specifi - cally on modern-day events that fi red up concerns about ethical issues, it may be illuminating to give a sense of how the consequences of those events, as indeed even the need for this Handbook, can be understood as a piece in a larger philosophical mosaic. In the limited space available, it is hard to know where to begin so as not to oversimplify the big picture too much because it extends well beyond the quantitative footing of modern science. If we substitute “mathematical” for statistical or quantitative, and if we equate the development of modern science with the rise of experimentalism (i.e., per demonstrationem), then we might start with Roger Bacon, the great English medieval academic and early proponent of experimental science. In his Opus Majus, written about 1267, Bacon developed the argument that:
Given the sweep of events from Bacon to Galileo and Newton, then to the 20th century and to our own cultural sphere, it is hardly a revelation to point out that the idea of “certainty without doubt” and the notion of “truth without error” were an illusion. The scientifi c method is limited in some ways that are specifi able (e.g., ethical mandates), in ways that are
“unknowable” because humans are not omniscient, and in symbolic ways that we “know” but cannot communicate in an unambiguous way (cf. Polanyi, 1966).
