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The Grammar of Science
Karl Pearson’s 1892 positivist manifesto declaring that science describes the regularities of sense-impressions and must remain silent about causes—the philosophical foundation that every large language model embodies by construction, and the most important book in the intellectual history of AI that nobody in the field reads.
Karl Pearson published The Grammar of Science in 1892 as a philosophical manifesto, not a technical manual, and it made a claim so radical it has mostly been absorbed without being noticed: that science does not explain the world, it only describes it, and that asking for anything more is a relic of metaphysics that grown-up minds should outgrow. The field of science, Pearson declared, is unlimited; its material is endless; every phenomenon is data. And the method is one: the classification of facts, the recognition of their sequences and relative significance. A scientific law is nothing more than “a brief description in mental shorthand of as wide a range as possible of the sequences of our sense-impressions.” Cause, for Pearson, was just a very tight correlation—the name we give to an antecedent stage in a routine of perceptions, nothing more occult than that. This is the philosophy that
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