The rise of probability, detection and the ‘Unity of Design’ between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

What role did the concepts of evidence and probability play in the development of detection? Ian Hacking’s seminal The Emergence of Probability (1975) – together with his subsequent The Taming of Chance (1990) – provides us with conceptual tools that enable us to reassess the transition from Eighteenth-century crime fiction, with its focus on the exploits of the criminal, to Nineteenthcentury detective fiction, with its focus on the investigation. Drawing on Hacking’s theories, my paper tries to bridge the gap between science and culture in order to show how the relatively recent ideas of evidence and probability surfaced into the late Eighteenth-century discursive domain of criminography, fostering both a rational formof detection and a new concept of the plot, resting on a causal pattern.