Cournot, Antoine Augustin (1801–77)

Cournot is best known for his work in applying mathematical techniques to economic and social affairs and is generally acknowledged to be the founder of econometrics. His work in philosophy, however, is at least as distinguished. His philosophy may be seen as a meditation on continuity and discontinuity, on law and brute empirical fact, which is unassimilable to law. Empiricism is exclusively preoccupied with the latter phenomenon, rationalism with the former. Cournot affirmed the reality of both. His philosophy thus mediates between empiricism (which, when it is consistent, leads on his view to scepticism) and rationalism (which, when it is consistent, loses contact with reality).

Continuity is real because the world is not a chaos; it is a network of events, forming various series, which reveal necessary and determinable relations. But discontinuity is also real, for the order we discern in the various events is not a single order. The series are independent and the points where they intersect cannot be predicted from within the series themselves. Brute contingency is therefore as real as law. Consequently, though the world may be known, it can never be reduced to a single scheme.