PHIL 103 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Percentile
21 Jul 2020
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Reasoning with numbers: much, perhaps most, public reasoning and persuasion using numbers uses them in a highly representative way: some complex state of affairs is boiled down to some number. It depends on how well we understand the state of affairs it represents, and on how accurate it is. 1 | p a g e: ordinal numbers, averages. In all cases, the crucial questions involve: lost information, misleading suggestion, whether the metric, or underlying measurement, is intelligibly mathematized. Percentages: not (normally) an absolute number, meaningfulness depends in part on the size of the absolute values involved, cannot be straightforwardly combined with other percentages, without knowing and controlling for differences in absolute values. For example: 40% of class 1 got an a grade and 60% of class 2 got an a grade, we cannot average these and conclude that 50% of both classes combined got an a grade.
