Percentages and perchance: archaic forms in the twenty-first century

Abstract

As sequel to an earlier paper on ordinal ranking, this paper focuses on another old, but increasingly widespread, numerical expression, in both technical and public domains: namely, the percentage. It argues that the long and expanding genealogy of use, from descriptive to governmental to probabilistic, gives it persuasive as well as instrumental power, as people come to grips with novel terms of life by drawing on old concepts. The ‘one hundred’ offers a sense of understanding, while in public expressions, there appears to be an increasing vagueness of the specific nature of the one hundred as denominator and a new potential for one hundred to gesture towards an aspirational future rather than any simple description of the present. The second section engages with Helen Verran's approach to number, where she shows how numerical expressions can move from one mode to another through the possibility of expressing both one/many and part/whole relationships. The next section illustrates the applications of percentage in different domains of social life, particularly as proportion in governance (the tax regime) and political philosophy (Rawls on ‘fairness’), both of which orient instrumentally towards a future. The final section describes a current representation of the city of Baltimore in ordinals and percentages, oriented in more clearly expressive, aspirational terms, towards a future whose nature has become indeterminate. The conclusion reaffirms the importance of an ethnographic approach to widely used numerical forms, such as percentage, in all contexts, as they mediate public understanding and aspiration.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 33 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.