Practice question · True or false
Comte first called his new science "social physics" and changed the name after Quetelet used the same phrase for a different project.
Hints
- Ask why a founder would abandon a term he had already used in print.
- A Belgian statistician had taken the phrase for the study of averages in populations.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. Quetelet’s 1835 work on the "average man" claimed the phrase for a statistical enterprise Comte disliked, so Comte coined sociologie instead, a Latin-Greek hybrid he knew was ugly. The discipline’s name is a piece of terminological self-defence.
Practise The Birth of a Discipline
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