“Provisional numbers are used in planning and strategizing, i.e. to assist groups in setting the parameters for tasks at hand and debating their relative merit.“
They are provisional in the sense that they may be refined and consolidated at a later date, and as such are not strictly accurate. Whereas :
“False Numbers appear when the primary task is to learn how to deploy numbers, making the relative accuracy of the numerical sign less important than the attempt to master the logic of formal procedures.”
The strongest attribute of false numbers is that they start out being false, are used whilst they are false, and remain false until the end. Introducing a possible source of confusion for many outside the high level accounting world – who might assume that numbers should always be an accurate representation of reality. And that should not be so, argues the professor.
“It will be argued that assuming the effective use of numbers depends upon their veracity obscures crucial social processes at the heart of modernizing practices, such as rationalization and standardization.”
And thus :
“Rather than subvert the ostensible purpose of fixed representation, I argue that provisional and false numbers make stability and fixity in representation possible as a final result”
The paper includes examples of curious implement use in business forecasting, property tax assessments, and the introduction of accounting into cooperative agriculture in Stalinist Hungary.
False numbers as formalizing practices is published in Social Studies of Science June 2010, vol. 40 no. 3 377-404, and can also be read in full here.