Science and Citizenship: Karl Pearson and the Ethics of Epistemology

When I was a boy the New York Daily Mirrorran on its masthead the injunction from John 8:32: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make ye free.” I was never too young to miss the irony of that statement on a Hearst newspaper, but I felt it asan irony that didn’t force me to question the ideal the masthead affirmed. I didn’t, however, know then that the apostle John and William Hearst were affirming a fundamental tenet of late-nineteenth-century positivism. The great Enlightenment ideal, the commitment to knowledge and rationality as a means to progressive improvement of the human condition, found one of its last important outlets in positivism. Let me red-facedly admit that—despite a lifetime of rebuffs—I have not given up that commitment.

Karl Pearson participated vigorously in it. In his 1892 Grammar of Science,he virtually begins, in a section called “Science and Citizenship,” by asserting that the scientific “frame of mind seems to me an essential of good citizenship.” ¹If this looks suspiciously like science as the opiate of the masses, it may also be taken as a good-faith commitment to the view that epistemology should be driven by human needs. Put that way, it sounds not like scientific disingenuousness but pragmatist revisionism. Surely, Pearson’s explanation has some contemporary resonance: “Every modern citizen,” he says, “is thrust into an appalling maze of social and educational problems.” And every citizen is “called upon to form a judgment apart, if it possibly may be, from his own feelings and emotions—a judgment in what he conceives to be the interests of society at large” (GS,10). Here an Arnoldian ideal of disinterest joins with positivist idealizing of knowledge.

The Grammar of Science,the most important summary of scientific epistemology, method, and possibility since John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophyof 1830, embraced both the political and epistemological ideals of a new vision for science and society. “The goal of science is clear,” Pearson concludes; “it is nothing short of the complete interpretation of the universe” (GS,18).

Against this scientific imperialism it would be easy now to succumb to the temptation to push once again the argument that scientific thought—ostensibly disinterested and objective—disguises self-interest and ideological complicity. Pearson was a propagandist for strong pre-Vienna Circle positivist theory and at the same time one of the most active and important of eugenicists. The connection makes itself. There can be no mistaking that his major scientific initiatives were ideologically driven by a passion for social reform, and a reform based on a eugenic program of racial improvement.

I want to resist that temptation. I am interested in shaking up what may be a current critical complacency latent in the idea that all knowledge is political. Of course. And then what? In Pearson’s case, for example, there is the fact of “statistics.” Statistics as a scientific discipline given shape and direction by Pearson is an indispensable tool of modern life. J. B. S. Haldane once remarked that Pearson’s “theory of heredity was incorrect in some fundamental respects. So was Columbus’s theory of geography. He set out for China, and discovered America.” ²It is partly because of this apparently odd result—the growth of a valuable science from an obviously ideologically driven enterprise—that I want to think about the implications of his work for our own relations to knowledge and science and politics. In addition, Pearson is a particularly interesting subject because his theories raise echoes of contemporary nonpositivist epistemological enterprises, and because his politics are far more complicated—he was both socialist and feminist—than the connection with eugenics first suggests. Pearson is, then, an ideal test case for my tentative exploration of the possibility of recuperating some aspects of the positivist enterprise, including certain elements of the cognitive and something like an imagination of uncontaminated knowledge.

I don’t propose, with Pearsonian hubris, to manage such a recuperation. At best, I expect to complicate the...