The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250-1600 Book

This book is an incoherent mess. Buried somewhere among the thickets of impenetrable prose, run-on sentences and sundry atrocities against the English language is a semi-decent idea. But Alfred W. Crosby sorely lacks the skills to bring it to light.

It's rare that a book can actually make me flinch, but AWC managed it on every other page. Two sample paragraphs convey the flavor of the writing:

Pantometry is one of the neologisms that appeared in increasing numbers in the languages of Europe in the first half of the second Christian millennium, words summoned into being by new tendencies, institutions, and discoveries. Milione and America are others. A general surge of more in the 1200s rendered a thousand thousand obsolete and inspired a convenient replacement: milione. Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci and the like created the need for America two centuries or so later. These words were sparks thrown off by the wheels of Western society veering and grating against the sides of old ruts. The veerings and gratings are the subject of this book, but first we must examine the ruts, that is to say, the view of reality that most medieval and Renaissance Western Europeans accepted. We can begin by putting aside the word rut.

The raison d'etre of this book is to describe an acceleration after 1250 or so in the West's shift from qualitative perception to, or at least toward, quantificational perception. Most particularly, we want to ferret out the source of that acceleration. The latter half of the assignment is daunting, and before we begin we must discuss just what we are looking for lest we convince ourselves we have found it before we get to it.

This is "scientific" writing at its worst - bloated (inclusion of the neologism "America" has nothing to do with the point he is trying to make; the second paragraph could be written simply as "This book aims to describe an acceleration in the West's shift from qualitative to quantitative perception that occurred after 1250, and to pinpoint its source"), meandering (what does that third sentence mean, anyway?), and inelegant to the point of ugliness ("quantificational"?, that hideous "wheels and sparks" metaphor, with its dreary corollary, that the book is about "veerings and scrapings".

The book is easily twice as long as it needs to be, and there is much meandering, repetitive bloviation which tends to obfuscate, rather than illuminate, whatever argument the author is trying to make. His credibility is not enhanced by glib, fanciful, and largely inaccurate characterizations of the nature of mathematics and of science. Although he acknowledges the central role of commercial and related accounting activities as an impetus towards improved measurement, he stints it implicitly by giving it only 20 pages of text, while devoting fully 60 pages to music and painting as stimuli. This seems frankly skewed, as does his failure to discuss scientific developments in an adequate fashion.

But this is an author who has no evident understanding of mathematics or the scientific method, who is unable to distinguish between true progress in mathematics, numerology and mathematical mysticism. This leads to paragraphs like the following:

"India, the home of Buddha, has produced and continues to produce a disproportionate number of brilliant pure mathematicians. The West has produced most of the good applied physicists, engineers, and accountants. (This may or may not be true of late, but I am speaking historically). One of history's most interesting problems is the question of why."

It is impossible to take this kind of sloppy rubbish seriously. This is a bad book, by an extremely mediocre 'scholar'.