Conversations on Peirce: Reals and Ideals

Eight Peirce and Pearson The Aims of Inquiry

eight peirce and pearson The Aims of Inquiry Doug Anderson and Michael J. Rovine  Our discussions regarding perception and inquiry naturally led to conversations on how Peirce’s method of inquiry operated in both science and practical affairs. Karl Pearson’s account was the more standard account for the time, and Peirce used this fact to highlight important features of his own understanding of science. Peirce and Karl Pearson, his contemporary and British counterpart in the study of statistics and the logic of inquiry, lived radically different lives. Peirce, having alienated himself from the university communities in which he might have found work, lost his fulltime job when the Coast and Geodetic Survey was overhauled in 1891 in the wake of accusations of financial improprieties. Pearson, on the other hand, held a major university appointment in England and was a member of the British Academy. Both were practicing scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers of science. During his lifetime Pearson was honored for his contributions to statistics and the development of the social sciences. Subsequently his name has figured {  } peirce and pearson  prominently in histories of statistics and the social sciences. Peirce, on the other hand, lived the last twenty years of his life in poverty and relative obscurity. Legend has it that though his manuscripts made their way to the Harvard Library, they nearly disappeared by being used as notepaper for students to record call numbers of books in the library. The papers were saved by Josiah Royce, who had them moved to the Department of Philosophy at Harvard.1 Peirce made what little income he could by writing journal articles, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews. One such review was of the second edition of Pearson’s The Grammar of Science; it appeared in The Nation in 1901.2 In the review we find evidence of Peirce’s respect for Pearson’s intellectual abilities: If any follower of Dr. Pearson thinks that in the observations I am about to make I am not sufficiently respectful to his master, I can assure him that without a high opinion of his powers I should not have taken the trouble to make these annotations, and without a higher opinion still, I should not have used the bluntness which becomes the impersonal discussions of mathematics. (CP 8.132) But we also find an articulation of important differences concerning the theory and practice of scientific inquiry—differences that seem to have underwritten some of the directions the social sciences took in the early twentieth century. Some of these differences were so important to Peirce that segments of the review were cast in an extremely polemical fashion. Though Peirce was often extreme and polemical in his manuscripts, he more often than not toned things down in print. The fact that he did not do so in this instance is not, we think, a mere oversight on his part. Rather, we believe it is a function of the importance he attached to the difference in outlooks that he and Pearson presented and of a genuine concern regarding the consequences of Pearson’s notion of scientific practice. As Peirce saw it, the most fundamental difference between Pearson ’s outlook and his own was, as noted in earlier chapters, the difference between nominalism and realism. Pearson’s thought was  doug anderson and michael j. rovine thoroughly governed by the nominalism of the tradition of British empiricism. This meant that for Pearson laws and truths were not real but were a function of an inquirer’s perspective. For Pearson, the ‘‘outside world’’ was ‘‘a construct’’:3 ‘‘Without the mental conceptions the law [of gravity] could not be, and it only comes into existence when these mental conceptions are first associated with the phenomena.’’4 A natural law is thus created, not discovered, and it is, for Pearson, ‘‘essentially a product of the human mind and has no meaning apart from man.’’5 For Peirce, on the other hand, natural laws were discoverable reals: The very being of law, general truth, reason—call it what you will—consists in its expressing itself in a cosmos and in intellects which reflect it, and in doing this progressively; and that which makes progressive creation worth doing—so the researcher comes to feel—is precisely the reason, the law, the general truth for the sake of which it takes place. (EP 2:58–59) In his 1892 review of...