André-Paul Weber Knihy

Only in France is demography essentially the population science: it is taught at school, newspapers feature the evolution of fertility rates in their headlines and the subject sparks ideological debates in the media. How did demography become a national identity issue? The French exception is attributable to a political history that reached fulcrums during the Second World War under the racist Vichy regime and then after the Liberation, with the development of population policies and the creation of the French National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED). The book is the first to retrace its controversial genesis and analyze its ramifications for the following decades. It shows how theories, institutions and demographic policies developed simultaneously in France. Its reflection on the links between ideologies, science and the state offers a model that could be applied to the history of many other scientific disciplines. Paul-André Rosental’s indispensable study examines the emergence of demography as an autonomous discipline and its association with the state in mid-twentieth-century France. Demography’s success in the immediate post-war years came in part from its dual concern with both „science“ and „action,“ which allowed policy makers to claim both knowledge and expertise in addressing social problems. Rosental’s measured tone hides a provocative argument that should serve as both a model and a foil for others working in the history of the human sciences. Joshua Cole, University of Michigan.

This, the second Festschrift honoring the dean of Gustav Mahler Scholarship, Henry-Louis de La Grange for his 90th birthday, includes vibrant, new historical, theoretical and aesthetic research on the complex mind which produced among the best-loved orchestral works and songs of Western classical music.

This book explores reasoning under uncertainty based on statistical evidence, focusing on the search for arguments supporting or opposing specific hypotheses. It comprises two key aspects: the first draws from classical formal logic, where deductions stem from a knowledge base of observed facts and domain-specific formulas. Here, statistical observations serve as the facts, while general knowledge is represented by a type of statistical model known as functional models. The second aspect addresses the uncertainty inherent in formal reasoning, utilizing the theory of hints. This approach assumes that an uncertain perturbation takes a specific value, allowing for logical evaluation of the resulting consequences. Consequently, the original uncertainty is transferred to the implications of this assumption, a process termed assumption-based reasoning. Before delving into the book's content, it is worthwhile to examine the historical roots of assumption-based reasoning within the statistical framework. In 1930, R. A. Fisher introduced the concept of fiducial distribution as a new form of argument, contrasting it with the traditional Bayesian argument, thereby laying foundational ideas that inform the discussions in this work.