Karl Pearson: Lives of a Statistician

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

SES 00-80104 - Theodore Porter (UCLA) - "Karl Pearson: Lives of a Statistician" This award supports a study of the early career of Karl Pearson, founder of the biometric school that worked out the modern methods of statistics. Pearson did not take up statistics until about 1892, when he was 35 years old. Before that he worked at a remarkable variety of topics and causes, including German religious history, history of philosophy, feminism, socialism, and the ethical value and cultural significance of science. He also wrote a romantic novel and a "nineteenth-century passion play." In many ways his early beliefs and values seem at odds with his later advocacy of statistics in almost every domain of inquiry. As a young man he wrote movingly of his desire to know nature directly, in contrast to the putative superficiality of quantitative knowledge. Yet his career displays striking continuities as well, above all in his lifelong opposition to individualism. This was expressed early in a strong moral commitment to socialism and an impulse to dissolve the self in nature. In his later writing, he exalted the rigors of scientific method as a vehicle for taming the individual and creating citizens. This work is also about objectivity, considered not mainly as a set of public, intellectual values, but rather from the standpoint of the internal life of the scientist. For Pearson, statistics was a strategy of self-discipline and renunciation. By giving up the impulse to know nature directly, he was able to define science in terms of method rather than subject matter, and in this way to universalize its claims. Pearson's early professional life provides the historian an unusual opportunity to integrate the private life with the research commitments of a mathematical scientist, and to show something of the sacrifice as well as satisfaction in fashioning a life of exact science. This work should be of interest not only to historians, but also to anyone concerned about the role of science in modern culture, or about patterns of recruitment into science according to intellectual and religious values, social class, ethnicity, and gender.