We adopt an `epistemic' interpretation of social decisions: there is an objectively correct choice, each voter receives a `noisy signal' of the correct choice, and the social objective is to aggregate these signals to make the best possible guess about the correct choice. One epistemic method is...

This paper discusses quantitative information as a historiographic instrument: its individual characteristics and those it shows in sets of data, its capacity to describe historical phenomena and the uses historian give to them. It specially examines the sense and limits of quantitative...