Science in Context 7, 3 (1994), pp. 563-589 PHILIP MIROWSKI A Visible Hand in the Marketplace of Ideas: Precision Measurement as Arbitrage The Argument While there has been much attention given to experiment in modern science studies, there has been astoundingly little concern spared over the practice of quantitative measurement. Thus myths about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in science still abound. This paper presents: (a) An explicit ma- thematical model of the stabilization of quantitative constants in a mathematical science to rival older Bayesian and classical accounts; (b) a framework for writing a history of practices with regard to treatment of quantitative measurement error; (c) resources for the comparative sociology of differing disciplines in this regard; and (d) a prolegomena to a critique of orthodox economics and accounting theories. The key to all these diverse themes is the realization that no one individual alone is capable of fixing the magnitude of a quantitative error estimate, and therefore the social construction of error must be given a more precise meaning, and that this occurs through the instrumentality of meta-analysis. Initiates into the social studies of science in the 1990s could easily be forgiven if they tended to equate the "social" with the "economic." Marxist analyses of science date back to the "Hessen thesis," if not earlier. Representatives of various earlier sociologies of science have more or less self-consciously used the metaphor of a "marketplace of ideas" as their starting point; while representatives of a more postmodernist bent, from Latour and Woolgar to Pierre Bourdieu, have reveled in the language of the market and the accumulation of credit in their debunking exercises. Perhaps more ominously, there are now signs that more conventional analytic philosophers of science such as Radnitzky (Radnitzky and Bernholz 1987), Goldman (1992), and Kitcher (1993) are appropriating mathematical models from neoclassical economics in order to reach some accommodation with what they regard as outlandish constructivist accounts of science. All of this newfound enthusiasm for economics amongst those who thought only a few short years ago that it should be safely quarantined on the far side of the demarcation divide is a phenomenon that deserves close scrutiny by philosophers and historians alike; but use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889700001824 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Notre Dame, on 07 Feb 2018 at 20:45:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of