In his words, applying a science-in-the-making perspective “the distinction between technical and social objects—underlying the separation between internal and external history— disappears” (p. 5[2]).

[3] The work of Desrosières mobilize the French style of social analysis of cognitive forms, looking at statistics as the ensemble of concepts, methods, and practices concerned with "making up things that hold".

[4] A central part of the book explores how socio-political structures of France, Britain, Germany, and the United States affect the establishment and evolution of the nationals statistical offices in these countries.

[5] The author discusses in depth how the activity of cathegorization, allocating individuals to classes, provide the encoding necessary for the realization of statistical constructs, following Durkheim's motto to 'treat social facts as things', thus creating new entities as poverty or unemployment.

[5] This project that Desrosières names 'objectification' is also offered by the author as a way to reconcile objective and subjective visions of probabilities, a dichotomy he retraces to the fourteenth-century confrontation between realists and nominalists.