PERSONAL
Home Address: 2319 N. Mar
Phone: (310)
474 3972
Work Address: Department of History
UCLA
6265 Bunche Hall
Phone: (310) 206-2352
fax: (310) 206-9630
email: tporter@history.ucla.edu
EDUCATION
POSITIONS
HELD
Deutsches Museum/University of Munich/TU
California Institute of Technology,
Division of Humanities and Social Sciences: Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral
Fellow (1981‑1984).
PUBLICATIONS
Books
The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820‑1900 (Princeton University Press, 1986; paperback
1988);
Italian
translation by Maria Elena Graziani as Le Origini del Moderno Pensiero
Statistico
(La Nuova Italia, 1993); Japanese translation (Azusa Shuppansha, 1995).
The Empire of Chance: How Probability
Changed Science and Everyday Life,
with G. Gigerenzer, Z. Swijtink, L. Daston, J. Beatty, L. Krüger (Cambridge
University Press, 1989; paperback 1990); German translation, 1998.
Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of
Objectivity in Science and Public Life
(Princeton:
University
Press, 1995; paperback 1996). Awarded Ludwik Fleck Prize of Society
for
Social Studies of Science, 1997.
Editor, with Dorothy Ross,
(
Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a
Statistical Age (
paperback
2005)
Selected Papers
"The Promotion of Mining and the
Advancement of Science: The Chemical
Revolution of
Mineralogy,"
Annals of Science, 38 (1981): 543‑570.
"Lawless Society: Social Science and the Reinterpretation of
Statistics in
Lorenz
Revolution,
volume 1: Ideas in History
(Cambridge: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1987):
351‑375.
Japanese translation, 1992.
"Natural Science and Social
Theory," R. C. Olby et al., eds., Companion to the History of
Modern
Science (London: Routledge, 1990): 1024-1043.
"Objectivity and Authority: How
French Engineers Reduced Public Utility to Numbers," Poetics
Today,
12 (1991): 245-265.
"Objectivity as Standardization: The
Rhetoric of Impersonality in Measurement, Statistics, and
Cost-Benefit
Analysis," Annals of Scholarship, 9 (1992): 19-59; reprinted in
Allan Megill, ed., Rethinking Objectivity (Durham: Duke UP, 1994),
197-237.
"Quantification and the Accounting
Ideal in Science," Social Studies of Science, 22 (1992): 633-
652.
"Statistics and the Politics of
Objectivity," Revue de Synthèse, 114 (1993): 87-101.
"Information, Power, and the View
from Nowhere" in Lisa Bud-Frierman, ed., Information
Acumen:
The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business (
Routledge,
1994), 217-230.
"The Death of the Object:
Fin-de-siècle Philosophy of Physics," in Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist
Impulses
in the Human Sciences (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), 128-151, 329-333
"Rigor and Practicality: Rival
Ideals of Quantification in Nineteenth-Century Economics," in
Philip
Mirowski, ed., Natural Images in Economic Thought: Markets Read in Tooth and
Claw,
(New York: Cambridge UP, 1994), 128-170.
"Making Things Quantitative" Science
in Context 7 (1994), 389-407
"Statistical Subjects," in
Thomas Kavanagh, ed., Chance, Culture, and the Literary Text,
"Information Cultures," Accounting,
Organizations, and Society, 20 (1995), 83-92.
"Precision and Trust: Early
Victorian Insurance and the Politics of Calculation," in M. Norton
Wise,
ed., The Values of Precision (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1995), 173-197
"Statistical and Social Facts from
Quetelet to Durkheim," Stephen Turner, ed., special issue of
Sociological
Perspectives on Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method, 38 (1995),
15-26.
"Les
Polytechniciens, le calcul économique, et la gestion des travaux publics,"
Dominque Pestre
et al., eds., La France des X:
deux siècles d'histoire (Paris: Economica, 1995), 195-202.
"Statistics, Social Science, and the
Culture of Objectivity," Oesterreichische Zeitschrift für
Geschichtswissenschaften,
7 (1996), 177-191.
"The Management of Society by
Numbers," in John Krige and Dominique Pestre, eds., Science in the 20th
Century (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), 97-110.
"Les
professionels des chiffres," Les Cahiers de Science et Vie, no. 48
(dec., 1998), 24-30.
“Reason, Faith, and Alienation in the Victorian
Fin-de-Siècle,” in Hans-Erich Bödeker, Peter
Reill, and
Jürgen Schlumbohm, eds., Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis, 1750-1900
(Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1999), 401-414.
“Life
Insurance, Medical Testing, and the Management of Mortality,” in
“Statistical Utopianism in an Age of
Aristocratic Efficiency,” Thomas Broman and Lynn Nyhart,
eds.,
Science and Civil Society, special issue of Osiris (17), 2002,
210-226.
“The Social Sciences,” in David L. Cahan,
ed., From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences:
Historiography
of Nineteenth-Century Science (
“The Culture of Quantification and the History of Public
Reason,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 26, no. 2 (2004),
165-177.
“Measurement, Objectivity, and Trust” and “Objectivity and
Trust: a Measured Rejoinder” in Measurement:
Interdiscipinary Research and Perspectives, vol. 1, no. 4 (2003) [issue,
including six commentaries, devoted to my topic essay, itself a presentation of
my book Trust in Numbers], 241-255
and 286-298.
Paul Fleming, “Life on the Bell Curve: An Interview with
Theodore Porter,” Cabinet, Issue 15
(fall, 2004), 90-95
“Karl Pearson’s Utopia of Scientific Education: From
Graphical Statics to Mathematical Statistics,” in Rudolf Seising, Menso
Foklerts, and Ulf Hashagen, eds., Form,
Zahl, Ordnung: Studien zur Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte (
“Medical Quantification: Science, Regulation, and the
State,” in Gerard Jorland, Annick Opinel, and George Weisz, eds., Body Counts: Medical Quantification in
Historical and Sociological Perspectives (
“Introduction: Historicizing the Two Cultures,” History of Science, 43 (2005), 109-114.
“Is the Life of
the Scientist a Scientific Unit,”
Science, 97 (2006), 314-321
“Speaking
Precision to Power: The Modern Political Role of Social Science” Social Research,
73, 4 (2006), 1273-1294
“Locating the
Domain of Calculation,” Journal of
Cultural Economy, 1 no. 1 (2008), 39-50
PAPERS
DELIVERED (over 250
conference papers and invited lectures in the US, Canada, Mexico, Germany,
France, Britain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Austria,
Portugal, Greece, Israel, and Turkey, including the 2007
History of Science Society Distinguished Lecture and keynotes for the
West Coast Society for History of Science; Cheiron: Society for History of
the Social and Behavioral Sciences; European Society for History of the Human
Sciences; Society for the History of Economic Thought, and various small conferences).
Research fellow, Zentrum für
interdisziplinäre Forschung der Universität
American Council of Learned Societies,
summer research fellowship, 1986.
Sesqicentennial Fellowship of
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
Fellowship, Spring, 1988.
National Endowment for the Humanities
summer stipend, 1989.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
fellowship, 1989‑90.
Arthur Andersen (!) Visiting Professor of
Accounting,
National
Science Foundation grants 1991-93, 1994-96, 2000-2002, 2006-2009.
Maison des
Sciences de l'Homme, Paris: Directeur d'Etudes Associé, May 1996.
European Summer School in Science
Studies, invited professor, Enschede, The Netherlands,
August,
1996.
Summer School on Sociology,
Max-Planck-Institut für
Wissenschaftsgeschichte, research fellow, June-July 1998, June-July 2008.
Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris: professeur invité, June 1999, June
2003, May 2004, November-December 2008.
History
of science summer laboratory on quantification and representation in
eighteenth-
century science, Tel Aviv, June 2000
(keynote speaker and senior instructor).
Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan : professeur
invité, Sept. 2002.
ESRC Genomics, Policy and Research Forum,
Corresponding member,
Member,