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Ellery Eells. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xii + 413 pp. $44.50. With two theories that employ probabilities, in Probabilistic Causality the philosopher Ellery Eells seeks to clarify our [...]

The article presents a case study in the diffusion of social "Scientific" research. The authors aims at a refinement and extension of researcher Michel Foucault's argument. His concern is not, however, with academic philosophy. Rather, he seeks to understand how statistically based academic studies in economics and sociology become part of politically charged social policy discussions and popular culture in the United States. The critique borrows and elaborates Foucault's information-processing metaphor and further develops his argument using the details of a recent example of distorted transmission. The author also offer explanations for such distortion and suggestions for its remedy. The academic survival of quantitative social researchers depends on their discovering social cause and effect relationships. Project directors in research organizations dependent on government funds must discover such relationships or risk decreasing the flow of such funds. Reporters will find a story in the discovery, not the absence, of such relationship. But relatively few discoveries of a social cause and effect relationship withstand a complete sensitivity analysis. So practices that slight such analyses become taken for granted. If a sensitivity analysis is done, it may not be very complete witness the attrition sensitivity analysis done by the researchers that neglects self-selection and subject-reporting.