QUANTIFICATION AND THE ACCOUNTING IDEAL IN SCIENCE

Objectivity in science has normally been defined by scholars as almost synonymous with realism. It may be advantageous to think of it instead in terms of impersonality, an ideal that would replace arbitrariness, idiosyncracy and judgment by explicit rules. Accounting is an exemplar of this aspect of objectivity. More important than the true representation of deep underlying financial identities is the maintenance of a system of rules that blocks self-interested distortion. Otherwise, tax codes and corporate reports would lose their credibility. From this standpoint, quantification appears as a strategy for overcoming distance and distrust. This pertains also to the natural sciences, where measurement and statistics have been crucial in transforming local experimental skills into public knowledge. We need to understand quantification as a response to a set of political problems, part of the moral economy of science. Its use in science is analogous in important ways to the explicitly political and administrative purposes served by accounting.