Karl Pearson citations (65 citations)

Karl Pearson: 65 citations0 J'aime

Karl Pearson: Citations en anglais

“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...”

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Karl Pearson

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

“Hundreds of men have allowed their imagination to solve the universe, but the men who have contributed to our real understanding of natural phenomena have been those who were unstinting in their application of criticism to the product of their imaginations. It is such criticism which is the essence of the scientific use of the imagination, which is... the very life-blood of science.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“The single statement, the brief formula, the few words of which replace in our minds a wide range of relationships between isolated phenomena, is what we term a scientific law. Such a law, relieving our memory from the burden of individual sequences, enables us, with the minimum of intellectual fatigue, to grasp a vast complexity of natural or social phenomena. The discovery of law is... the peculiar function of the creative imagination. But this imagination has to be a disciplined one.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“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.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“Although science claims the whole universe as its field... it confesses that its ignorance is more widely extended than its knowledge. In this very confession... it finds a safeguard for future progress. Science cannot... allow theologian or metaphysician... to the foreshore of our present ignorance, and so hinder the development in due time...”

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Karl Pearson livre 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.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“Who can give us the assurance that the fields already occupied by science are alone those in which knowledge is possible? Who, in the words of Galilei, is willing to set limits to the human intellect?”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“The ignorance of science means the enforced ignorance of mankind.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“Wherever there is the slightest possibility for the human mind to know, there is a legitimate problem of science. Outside the field of actual knowledge can only lie a region of the vaguest opinion and imagination, to which... men too often... pay higher respect than to knowledge.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introduction
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“Our aesthetic judgment demands harmony between the representation, and the represented and in this sense science is often more artistic than modern art.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“There is no short cut to truth, no way to gain a knowledge of the universe except through the gateway of scientific method.”

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Karl Pearson livre 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.”

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Karl Pearson livre 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.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“The universe is a variable quantity, which depends upon the keenness and structure of our organs of sense, and upon the fineness of our powers and instruments of observation.”

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Karl Pearson livre 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...”

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Karl Pearson livre 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.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“The field of science is unlimited; its material is endless, every group of natural phenomena, every phase of social life, every stage of past or present development is material for science. The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“The scientific method is one and the same in all branches, and that method is the method of all logically trained minds. In this respect the great classics of science are often the most intelligible of books, and... are far better worth reading than popularisations of them...”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“If any... work gives a description of phenomena that appeals to... imagination rather than to... reason, then it is bad science.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“One result of this obscurity we probably find in the ease with which the physicist, as compared with either the pure mathematician or the historian, is entangled in the meshes of such pseudosciences as natural theology and spiritualism.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

Preface to the First Edition
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.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

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

“There are periods in the growth of science when it is well to turn our attention from its imposing superstructure and to carefully examine its foundations. The present book is primarily intended as a criticism of the fundamental concepts of modern science...”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

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

“If the reader questions whether there is still war between science and dogma, I must reply that there always will be as long as knowledge is opposed to ignorance. To know requires exertion, and it is intellectually easiest to shirk effort altogether by accepting phrases which cloak the unknown in the undefinable.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

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

“That this change of view as to the basis of science cannot take place without misunderstanding, or without giving an opportunity to those who dislike science to decry its weaknesses, is only natural. To change the basis of operations during a campaign always gives a chance to the enemy, but the chance must be risked if thereby we place ourselves permanently in a position of greater strength...”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

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

“Formerly men had belief as to the supersensuous and thought they had knowledge of the sensuous. The science of the future, while agnostic as to the supersensuous, will replace knowledge by belief in the perceptual sphere, and reserve the term knowledge for the conceptual sphere—the region of their own concepts and ideas...”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

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

“That all science is description and not explanation, that the mystery of change in the inorganic world is just as great and just as omnipresent as in the organic world, are statements which will appear platitudes to the next generation.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

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

“Step by step men of science are coming to recognise that mechanism is not at the bottom of phenomena, but is only the conceptual shorthand by aid of which they can briefly describe and resume phenomena.”

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Karl Pearson livre The Grammar of Science

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

“Our conception of chance is one of law and order in large numbers; it is not that idea of chaotic incidence which vexed the mediaeval mind.”

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Karl Pearson

"The Chances of Death" (1895)

“It is not theory, but actual statistical experience, which forces us to the conclusion that, however little we know of what will happen in the individual instance, yet the frequency of a large number of instances is distributed round the mode in a manner more and more smooth and uniform the greater the number of individual instances. When this distribution round the mode does not take place... then we assert that some cause other than chance is at work.”

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Karl Pearson

"The Chances of Death" (1895)

“The old Dances of Death supplied what fails so much in our modern life—an artistic representation appealing to all classes of at least one experience common to the whole of humanity.”

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Karl Pearson

"The Chances of Death" (1895)

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