Philosophy, and maybe even human thought as such, has long been a quest for exactness; for figuring out the exact nature of reality and the forces that shape it; for figuring out the exact workings of language; for figuring out the exact meaning of happiness, justice, and the good life. Us humans, we gauge, compute and quantify: “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”.[1] Give us a world and we’ll hold a yardstick to it. Show us a universe and we’ll show you our metrics. Nothing escapes the ruler, the meter, the stopwatch, the word. But how exact do we want these systems of representation – our measurements and language – to be? Are we beings of exactness? Not in an absolute sense, for sure; nor all the time, it would seem; and, in some regards, maybe not at all. In order to substantiate these claims, I’ll take you through some thoughts on statistics, language, and ethico-political philosophy.
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