A man walks into a Perkins restaurant, and orders an omelet, juice, and coffee. The order arrives promptly. After a while, the waitress checks on him, and asks if he’s finished eating. One would expect the man to answer the waitress’s question with either “yes, thank you’ or “no, not yet, thank you.” One wouldn’t expect the patron to say that he’s “87% finished,” let alone “87.1% finished.”
That’s because people don’t typically describe tasks with such nicety. They don’t do so because they’re not sharp enough, but because they are sharp enough: they know that such supposed accuracy of measurement is a fiction.
(Looking at an omelet, and all items ordered, and then fixing the quantities involved so as to reduce consumption to a nice percentage isn’t believable. Trying to determine the exact quantities of the meal by glancing at the plate, the coffee cup, etc., and assessing progress as a definite percentage is a dubious task.)
So, if the man were to answer not merely that he was eighty-seven percent finished, but eighty-seven-point-one percent finished, the waitress would have every reason to think the patron was teasing. (52 and 52.0, for example, aren’t the same; they represent different degrees of measurement. If someone telling you he’s 52% done seems overdone, it’s more so when someone tells you he’s 52.0% done. )
If the patron were serious, somehow, the waitress would have sound reason to skip that table during his next visit.
Perhaps, I’d guess, it’s all meant to sound impressive, scientific, the height of positivism. By contrast, I’d suppose that even Comte wasn’t that much of a positivist.
Is using silly percentages like this a defensive technique? That is, if a person said he was ‘mostly done’ he might fear a question or two, but by answering “I’m 87.1% done” he feels he’s safely beyond inquiry. After all, isn’t someone who answers so exquisitely seem a man of science, like, say, Isaac Newton? Someone might question an ordinary man, but not a seemingly scientific man.
(That’s a false idea of science, and scientists. I’ll bet anything that Newton, himself, would never have answered a waitress with a percentage.)
One has no reason to be deterred upon hearing a flimsy percentage in the place of a straight-forward answer.