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Karl Pearson

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

AN IMPROBABLE PERSONAGE

BEGINNING IN 1892, when he took up statistics as his scientific vocation, Karl Pearson devoted himself relentlessly to a project of almost universal quantification. This work, the invention of a mathematical field of statistics, defined one of the landmark transitions in the history of the sciences, or indeed of public rationality. Until then he had been a thoroughly restless intellectual, as involved in politics, literature, and history as in science. These studies and experiences set up his wide-ranging career as a quantifier, and at the same time created conditions for enduring doubts about this mission, to which he thereafter dedicated his career, and about the form of society it helped to fashion. Having sought through philosophy, history, marital partnership, scientific method, and statistics to discipline and socialize the egoistic self, he came increasingly to fear that the modern project of specialized science would fragment selfhood and suppress individuality.

When Pearson was twenty-three, in 1880, the autobiographical Arthur of his novel The New Werther effervesced to his lover, Ethel: "What meaning has the word 'kiss' to him who does not know that through the electric contact of a moment two fiery souls may feel united for an eternity? What meaning has the word 'life' for him who has only existed in order to hand down his name to posterity in the footnotes of a classic or as inventor of an integral?" Half a century later, as his wife (he thought) lay dying, he recalled his grand scientific ambitions and pronounced his career a failure. "Twenty years hence a curve or a symbol will be called 'Pearson's' & nothing more remembered of the toil of the years." In this his most tragic voice he ascended to prophecy, for this "Pearson" has survived primarily as the name of a correlation coefficient. Forgotten is not only a complex individual, but also the historical mood, the ethical and political aspirations, the literary and philosophical sources, and the scientific vision that brought into being this technical art, which in the twentieth century would reconfigure scientific and social reason.¹

As revolutions devour their children, so science has meant the compression of memory. Artists and authors are at least memorialized by their works, which may then be linked to the circumstances of their lives and times. The sciences reduce even their most eminent men and women to a few discrete discoveries, a single dimension. The legitimacy, perhaps even necessity, of forgetting is often seen as concomitant to scientific progress, and statistics in the twentieth century has been integral to this aspect of the scientific identity. Pearson, who was unfailingly attentive to the past, recognized this characteristic of the institutions to which he devoted his life, and lamented it. In later life he devoted much attention to the history of his field. Beginning in his youth he wrote a series of more-or-less disguised or fictionalized autobiographies, stories of a dissatisfied man with grand ambitions, later the apostle of a new faith. He preserved an immense fund of documents, whether flattering or not, among the most extraordinary of which is the letter just mentioned, addressed to his sister-in-law, Elisabeth Cobb. In it he summed up his career and his marriage, both as tragic failures. "Please destroy," it begins, followed by a salutation: "My dear Bessie, I want you when you have read this to destroy this at once. I should not like it to come by accident into any other person's hands and you must let me know that you have destroyed it." Below his signature he reiterated, "As I have said, destroy at once." But she never had the opportunity. At the top of the last page, in thinner script, we find: "Never sent. K. P."

From youth on, Pearson's acquaintances often characterized him as cold, emotionless, and rationalistic. In view of his fierce intellectuality and disposition to theorize about everything from religious faith to sexual love, it was a pardonable misperception. Yet he cultivated also-and he wanted the world to know-a different self, one that pondered deeply and suffered, living a life that he alternately imagined as tragic and as triumphant, but that in any case was formed against a background of fateful social and intellectual change. Most of the time he was self-consciously in revolt against the dominant tendencies of his age, yet in retrospect he has seemed often to epitomize some of its less attractive features, especially by his faith in eugenics. An opponent of all compartmentalization, he was a strong advocate of cultural history, which for him was made up of folklore, religion, economy, labor, art, and science, of emotion and reason, none separable from the others. He saw his own life in these terms and deliberately left behind its traces, from which his younger daughter, Helga, later gathered up, organized, and annotated a vast collection of letters and other documents. Through these papers his intense commitments and wide-ranging intellectual ambitions can be reconstructed, and with them, some of the richness of his connections to his age. We are reminded that rationality, even in its guise as calculation, does not reduce to scientific and administrative routines. In Pearson's life we experience it in a scene of personal cultivation and social struggle, where it has inspired the fiercest of passions.

Pearson's research interests were almost bewilderingly disparate. He was sometimes proud of the range of his scholarly activities, but he also worried of falling into dilettantism. He wanted badly to believe that there was some coherence to it all, or at least to the trajectory of his development. For contemporary humanistic scholarship, which adores fragmentation and is skeptical of unitary "metanarratives," his self-conception must appear largely as wishful thinking. Indeed, no life achieves full coherence, and his centrifugal tendencies were stronger than most. Yet Pearson was right. My aim here is to examine the ways that it all holds together-how, for example, the author of an unsuccessful "nineteenth-century passion play" left his imprint on the philosophy of scientific method and even on statistics.

After trying out a sequence of possible careers and displaying vast iconoclastic ambition in each, Pearson made his mark in what seems one of the more mundane areas of modern life. He endeavored to provide appropriate tools of measurement and calculation for the quantitative analysis of social and scientific problems. This statistical project has been a curious and paradoxical one. It has brought forth many prophets and missionaries-calling for a great reformation of scientific or practical life, and working to reshape a discipline or a professional practice-but no saints. It has never been personified, at least not to a larger public. Pearson himself preached impersonally on behalf of "Saint Biometrika," and in his gloomy letter to Cobb he explained that his ambition had been to establish "a new tool in science which would give certainty where all was obscurity and hypothesis before." It seemed a thankless task. "I have made many enemies and few friends in the process for I was upsetting old idols and endeavouring to replace them by new gods whom scientists of the old training would not accept."²

For this unrelenting controversialist, statistics meant battles unceasing against numberless opponents for methods that, as he thought, must in the end prevail because they were right, and because the future would require them. He also made many enemies from within the camp of statistics, most notably the equally acerbic Ronald Aylmer Fisher, who, by the brilliance of his work and the scorn of his commentaries, contributed to the dimming of Pearson's reputation among his disciplinary heirs.³ Few outside the field have recognized the extent of disagreement and controversy within it, and so few have been able to appreciate the richness and contingency, the fierce emotions and vaulting ambitions, that have characterized its history. It is a story full of ironies, of an enterprise that was created to manage the chaos of chance, and to answer by measurement and calculation what others could only debate.

TELEOLOGY AND PURPOSE: HISTORICAL IMPLICATIONS

The statistical project, Pearson's endeavor, has not been passed over entirely by the historical gaze. Statisticians are no less interested in the history of their field than most other scientists, and there is by now a wealth of serious historical research from various perspectives on its development. The ideas and practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when governments and reformers imposed quantitative order on unruly populations, have been particularly interesting to historians and social scientists.⁴ In the twentieth century, the role of mathematics has become increasingly decisive, and studies of these new statistical tools and practices are gradually being written, episode by episode and discipline by discipline.⁵ In the end, a picture will emerge of a powerful body of mathematics, allied to schemes for gathering data and designing experiments, that has become one of the most important sources of scientific expertise and guarantors of objectivity in the modern world. It is the narrow gate through which must pass new pharmaceuticals, manufacturing processes, official measures of all descriptions, and the empirical findings of psychologists, economists, biologists, and many others. In that sense, its import goes far beyond the history of a mathematical discipline. Statistics has functioned as no narrow specialty, but as a vital if often invisible element in the cultural history of government, business, and the professions, as well as of science.

In some sense this is widely understood, though more often by social scientists than by cultural or political historians. Sociology has a body of theory ready-made for explaining developments of this kind, one associated particularly with the name of Max Weber, which presents a process of "rationalization" as intrinsic to modernity, and identifies science and bureaucracy as its standard-bearers. From this perspective, the development of quantitative methods is readily seen as important, but also as natural and even inevitable. The reconstruction of history as teleology has to some degree been the fate of all the sciences, whose stories continue to be told in textbooks and journalism as epics (or often mere lists) of theoretical and experimental advances. Even if this were an adequate way to write the internal history of science (most historians of science these days think not), there is nothing inevitable about its cultural and political role.

The very boringness, as most people suppose, of quantitative methods testifies to their pervasiveness and to a common assumption that their application is virtually automatic. Yet their success was never easy or routine, but was challenged repeatedly on many levels. That point is immediately evident in any serious historical study of measurement and quantification in practice. Their aggressive impersonality may not point to any inherent tendency of bureaucratic activity or scientific investigation, but rather to a flight from the subjective in the face of suspicions and challenges.

This book explores the topic of objectivity and its contradictions from a different angle, focusing on an individual rather than a set of impersonal institutions. It is, in a way, the life of a great statistician, yet the first seven of the book's ten chapters are not mainly about statistics. I discuss in the epilogue the implications of my attention to a single person, and the standing of the individual in science. Here I emphasize some of the advantages that the more tightly focused perspective brings, apart from the immense fascination of this varied and tormented life. Its protagonist emerges as receptive and yet doctrinaire, participating in the great scientific and social movements of his time but never at ease with them. His mission, as it emerged in the early 1890s, was formed of many ingredients, including religiosity and unbelief, historical vision, "the woman's question," eugenic socialism, applied mathematics, and evolutionary biology. These materials were made available to him by his culture, and a crucial element of the story is how he sought to integrate them into a coherent life. He wanted science to become the basis of shared values and a unified culture, as the Church had been for medieval Europe. Yet he lived at a time when strong moves to disciplinary specialization were narrowing the public role of science. His own field of statistics, despite its universalist claims, tended more to advance than to inhibit these developments.

If an "age of science" means that scientific knowledge or training should bring access to the levers of power, then Pearson's time was not really one of these. Although he was able through his immense determination to build a "biometric school," he was rarely a consultant to the powerful, and his methods only slowly penetrated a civil service dominated by men formed on very different principles from those he offered. What he advertised as a new, general method, they understood as a technical specialty, which, as such, would at best be suited to contribute to the consideration of certain narrow questions. Pearson optimistically anticipated that in the end the governors would recognize their need for his tools, and in a way this proved right, but he could not have felt himself, in his own time, supported by the crushing force of modernity. His was, in a way, a utopian project, even a hopeless quest, and quantifiers had to play a role in creating the conditions under which their methods would become influential. Such methods have never been hegemonic, except in very particular domains. A focus on a single career, and especially this one, brings the seeming colossus of quantification, and its sibling "scientific method," into the contingent domain of history. It reveals many of the cultural components out of which these ambitions were fashioned, how they were situated in a field of competing alternatives, and how a program for science such as Pearson's presumed also a vision of the moral character of its practitioners.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A LIFE

A life such as Pearson's would provide excellent materials for a novel, and I have tried in this book to develop some of its novelistic aspects. But these, too, can be historically situated, and they pertain to an enterprise that has made a difference. Pearson helped to create something new and important, a body of applied mathematics allied to a conception of scientific rationality as a form of personal renunciation.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Karl Pearson by Theodore M. Porter Excerpted by permission.
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