Theodore Porter argued in The Rise of Statistical Thinking that the effort to provide a synthetic social science is a matter of both administration and discovery combined, and that the rise of social science was, therefore, marked by both pragmatic needs as much as by theoretical purity.
Theodore Porter tvrdio je u djelu The Rise of Statistical Thinking kako napor za osiguravanje sintetske društvene znanosti predstavlja materiju kombinirane administracije i otkrića, a uspon društvene znanosti stoga je obilježen pragmatičkim potrebama jednako kao i teoretskom čistoćom.