Traces the ways in which educational researchers referred to Ronald A. Fisher's analysis of variance (ANOVA) between 1932 and 1944 in the "Journal of Experimental Education" (JXE). Shows how the changes in citational practices served to separate the ANOVA from its affiliation with Fisher, essentially effacing the memory of its human conditions of…

One of the signatures of scientific writing is its ability to present the claims of science as if they were "untouched by human hands." In the early years of experimental education, researchers achieved this by adopting a citational practice that led to the sedimentation of their cardinal method, the analysis of variance, and their standard for…

Considers how if literacy is envisioned as a sort of competence in a set of social and intellectual practices, then scientific literacy must encompass the realization that "statistical significance," the cardinal arbiter of social scientific knowledge, was not born out of an immanent logic of mathematics but socially constructed and reconstructed…

Traces the term "logos" from the ninth to the fourth century B.C. to distinguish between its general meaning and its technical definition within classical rhetoric. Shows that Aristotle's "pistis" of "logos" refers, not to an appeal to logic, but to the argument or speech itself, which reinstates all three proofs of persuasion as legitimate,…