Scientific Method And The Rhetoric of Science In Britain, 1830–1917

Abstract

The Tribune of October 1945 carried a contribution from George Orwell entitled ‘What is Science’? While noting that this question could be answered by referring to the body of knowledge about the natural world, Orwell perceived that science had also come to denote a ‘method of thought’. Alluding to the contemporary debate about curriculum content, he suggested that the demand for more science education involved ‘the claim that if one has been scientifically trained one’s approach to all subjects will be more intelligent than if one had no such training.¹ At this point, Orwell identified an important theme in the public rhetoric of science — the appeal to what Beatrice Webb called the ‘cult of the scientific method’.² This phenomenon was enshrined in Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science, published in 1892, in which he declared that the ‘scientific habit of mind’, apart from the intellectual triumphs it had accomplished since the seventeenth century, was now called upon to play a vital historical role in a period of rapid social and political change.