Re-emphasizing our agenda for this special issue as marking the shift from epistemological to ontological concerns in social science inquiry, Patti Lather locates it in challenging the orthodoxies of both positivist and critical approaches to the calculative, computational thinking and the limits of reason. With a focus on an escape from psychometrics in education research, she grounds her remarks in the context of the wider terrain of the possibilities of quantification for cultural studies and (post)critical inquiry.