The social construction of numbers begins with the basic learning that occurs when children are taught how to count. Stone (2021, p. 4) observes that counting: “entails two mental moves: first classifying, then tallying. In the first phase, counting is a way of making metaphors, because we start by finding similarities among things that are different.” We count “two” chairs, even though these chairs might not look much like one another and are of different colors. This gathering together of diverse entities is a social constructive act: we are told, as children, that there is something called a “chair” that takes on different forms.
It is even slipperier when we are seeking to measure ongoing events rather than inert entities such as chairs. How do we determine the number of times someone has told the truth or told a lie? How much time does it take to complete a task? I was even asked recently to indicate how many hours or days (or years) it takes from someone to become a leader. In order to measure these elusive phenomena or outcomes, we must not only provide a definition of what it means to provide “truth”, to “finish” a task, or “be” a leader, we must also provide punctuation that indicates when something has started and when it has finished. When does the presentation of truth or lies begin and end; when does the task begin and end; and when does the challenge of becoming a leader begin and end? As far back as the 1960s, Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues (1967) indicates that punctuation might reside at the hear of all communication (and miscommunication).
Measurement is challenging and not easily learned (as a child) or engaged in the real world (as an adult). As Stone (2021, p. 4) goes on to note:
Numbers—those things people revere because they’re so precise and objective? We construct them by making our own decisions [guided by social conventions] about how to separate things into groups. In the split second before we decide, the thing could to either way; it could be a this or it could be a that. Numbers are a magic wand that resolves ambiguity into one-ness.
I would add to what Stone has observed by noting that our rapid decision is aided by the realities (categories) that are assigned by the society (and culture) in which we live. The “magic wand” is based in social conventions.
Put simply (and dramatically) by Stone (2021, p. 12):
Categorizing cooks the numbers –not to the sense of deliberate fudging, though there’s plenty of fudge to go around, but in the sense that someone has to make judgments and interpretations before counting can begin. Numbers are product of our imagination, fictions really, no more true than poems or paintings. In this sense of fiction, all statistics are lies.
Snow’s two cultures suddenly collapse, for there is no more ultimately “objectivity” in numbers and science then there is in narratives and the humanities. Under conditions of despair and disillusionment, we can conclude (as Stone suggest) that all numbers and measurements as “fictions.” I would suggest that this declaration is only warranted if we stick with a strict, objectivist definition of science and are thus surprised to learn that this strict definition is not warranted. There are important (even critical) ways in which to judge the veracity of a specific measurement tool and the resulting numbers obtained. We just need to remember that this is only one version of reality.
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