Karl Pearson: Fact

Karl Pearson was English mathematician and biometrician. Explore interesting quotes on fact.
Karl Pearson: 130 quotes0 likes

“If my view be correct, Erasmus Darwin planted the seed of suggestion in questioning whether adaptation meant no more to man than illustration of creative ingenuity; the one grandson, Charles Darwin, collected the facts which had to be dealt with and linked them together by wide-reaching hypotheses; the other grandson, Francis Galton, provided the methods by which they could be tested...”

Karl Pearson

The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (1914)

“All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“Now it will, I think, be found that the fields of inquiry where science has not yet penetrated and where the scientist still confesses ignorance, are very like... alchemy astrology and witchcraft... Either they involve facts which are in themselves unreal—conceptions which are self-contradictory and absurd, and therefore incapable of analysis by the scientific or any other method,—or, on the other hand, our ignorance arises from an inadequate classification and a neglect of scientific method.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“Each metaphysician has his own system, which to a large extent excludes that of his predecessors and colleagues. Hence... metaphysics are built either on air or on quicksands—either they start from no foundation in facts at all, or the superstructure has been raised before a basis has been found in the accurate classification facts.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“To say that there are certain fields—for example, metaphysics—from which science is excluded, wherein its methods have no application, is merely to say that the rules of methodical observation and the laws of logical thought do not apply to the facts, if any, which lie within such fields. These fields, if indeed such exist, must lie outside any intelligible definition which can be given of the word knowledge.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“When... a simple principle has been discovered... then this principle or law itself generally leads to the discovery of a still wider range of hitherto unregarded phenomena... Every great advance of science opens our eyes to facts which we had failed before to observe, and makes new demands...”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“Scarcely any specialist of to-day is really master of all the work which has been done in his own comparatively small field. Facts and their classification have been accumulating at such a rate that nobody seems to have leisure to recognise the relations of sub-groups to the whole. It is as if individual workers... were bringing their stones to one great building and piling them on and cementing them... without regard to any general plan... only where some one has placed a great corner stone... the building... rises... more rapidly... till it... is stopped for want of side support. Yet this great structure... possesses a symmetry and unity... in scientific method. The smallest group of facts, if properly classified and logically dealt with, ...has its proper place... wholly independent of the individual workman who... shaped it. Even when two men work unwittingly at the same stone they will but modify and correct each other... In the face of all this enormous progress... when in all civilised lands men are applying the scientific method... the goal of science is and must be infinitely distant.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“The obscurity which envelops the principia of science is not only due to an historical evolution influenced by the authority which attaches even to the phraseology used by great discoverers, but to the fact that science, as long as it had to carry on a difficult warfare with metaphysics and dogma, like a skilful general conceived it best to hide its own deficient organisation.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Preface to the First Edition
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“Does not the beauty of the artist's work lie for us in the accuracy with which his symbols resume innumerable facts of our past emotional experience? ... [A]esthetic judgment... how exactly parallel it is to the scientific judgment.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory. Pearson refers the reader to William Wordsworth's preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1815) "General View of Poetry".
The Grammar of Science (1900)