People's Glossary
A note in advance[edit]
The following overview can be understood as a small collection of important people in philosophy, statistics and science in general. The list is by no means exhaustive! Rather, it is intended to give a flavor of how many people contribute and have contributed to the generation of new knowledge. It shows once again that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Looking at the list, however, it is striking that it is predominantly people read as male who are presented. This is evidence of deep structural problems and a systematic gender bias that we do not support and therefore wish to draw attention to. Here is a podcast that tackles this problem by telling the stories of women and queer people who are missing from history books.
| Person of interest | About the person | |
|---|---|---|
| Alhazen a.k.a. al-Haytham, Ibn (ca.965-1041 CE)(Antique) | The Arabic mathematician and astronomer can be considered a polymath, working on the principles of optics, scientific questioning and experimental observation. He is one of many who shaped the rise of science in the Islamic world during medieval times. Seeking to connect things in order to gain a more realistic view of the world, he developed the approach of controlled testing, which combined systematic experimentation with mathematical reasoning and brought us closer to the concrete application of scientific methods . | |
| Aristotle (384–322 CE) | Aristotle is one of the founders of Western philosophy. He asked the question: “What is a subject’s nature?” which led the way in dealing with the subject (or misconception) of true and deep causality. Aristotelian logic says: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.” This form of deductive reasoning is known as syllogism. | |
| Bacon, Francis (1561-1626) | The English politician was part of the debate about facts and truths. He triggered an increase in empirical inquiry in the form of systematic observation and opened up a new world in science. This led to the deepening of scientific disciplines. Bacon devised a method whereby scientists set up experiments to manipulate nature and try to prove their hypotheses wrong. He insisted that these experiments had to be repeated consistently before 'truth' could be known. However, Bacon was also aware of bias, categorizing it as the four idols of the mind (idola mentis) and insisting that everything must be doubted before its truth could be assumed. | |
| Bayes, Thomas (around 1701-1761) | A probability theorist and philosopher who developed the basic principles of Bayesian methods. Bayesian inference is a statistical approach that bases calculations on distributions derived from currently available data. It uses an imperfect or small sample as a basis for statistical interference. It is nothing short of a miracle that Bayes proposed the theoretical basis for the theory named after him more than 250 years ago. Bayesian statistics can be seen as the counterpart to frequentist statistics. | |
| Bernoulli, Jakob (1655–1705) | Jakob Bernoulli was the first of the Bernoulli family of Swiss mathematicians. As well as being a great mathematician, he was also a theologian and natural scientist. Among his many achievements, he paved the way for the introduction of stochastics and had an influence on the field of probability theory. His work was intended to help improve decision-making at all levels of human society. Unfortunately, he was far ahead of his contemporaries and was often not understood. However, he was convinced that his work Ars conjectandi was the most important of his works, with the focus not on the mathematical content but on the foundations of science. This was because it dealt with the quantification of uncertainty. | |
| Bhaskar, Roy (1944-2014) | An English philosopher who initiated the movement of Critical Realism. Roy Bhaskar proposed three ontological domains (strata of knowledge): the real (which is everything there is), the actual (everything we can grasp), and the empirical (everything we can observe). It says that all science can only unlock parts of reality that are not necessarily connected or can be meaningfully connected, since some parts of reality cannot be observed. | |
| Box, George (1919-2013) | A famous quote attributed to Box is: "All models are wrong, some models are useful". He recognized the limitations of models. George Box was the son-in-law of R.A. Fisher. His only education was an incomplete course in chemistry at a polytechnic school. However, his life's work spans many areas of statistical research, dealing with both theory and application. | |
| Da Vinci, Leonardo (1452-1519) | Da Vinci is also known as a polymath. He was an Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect and engineer. He is best known for his paintings, journals and notebooks, which reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and mechanical ingenuity that was centuries ahead of its time. | |
| Darwin, Charles (1809-1882) (Age of reason) | Founder of Darwinism. He conducted one of the first field experiments to show that the introduction of grazing animals increases the diversity of plant species on a lawn. Accordingly, he saw biological variation as a fundamental aspect of life and made it the basis of his theory of the survival of the fittest. His conclusion was that life forms change in response to environmental stress, so that changing environments gave a slight advantage to those random changes that were better adapted to the new environment. | |
| Feyerabend, Paul (1924-1994) | Feyerabend was one of the most famous philosophers of science of the twentieth century. He criticized Karl Popper's "critical rationalism" and generally rejected the dogma of science altogether, which was a crucial step towards a critical perspective on methods. He advocated logic, freedom and anarchy in science, and his work focused on problems rather than approaches. | |
| Fisher, Sir Ronald Aylmer (R.A.) (1890-1962) | He had a dramatic impact on the world of statistics. Among other contributions, he deductively discovered linear relationships and invented the analysis of variance. Fisher also thought about experiments and experimental design, where he argued very strongly in favor of randomization. He started out in agriculture, working at the Rothamsted Agricultural Experimental Station, designing experiments with different fertilizer components. His lifelong enemy was Karl Pearson.
Not only did Fisher work in the ethically problematic field of eugenics, but he can also be seen as a very irrational scientist. He was an early proponent of certain eugenic ideas, and was accused of being a racist. Fisher had a twin who was stillborn. Throughout his career he has studied twins and their fitness, trying to find out who survives and why. This is in line with Laudan's theory that scientists often make bold but irrational decisions. | |
| Galilei, Galileo (1564- 1642) | Galileo was an Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician who first challenged scientific paradigms. His work enabled a deeper understanding of how we see the world and paved the way for the scientific method. He worked mainly in the fields of astronomy, physics and engineering. Much of his work was viewed critically. In 1610 Galileo discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter (now called the Galilean moons) and the rings of Saturn. In 1633, the Church condemned him to life imprisonment for his heresy in claiming that the earth revolved around the sun. Galileo served his sentence under house arrest and died at home in 1642 after an illness. | |
| Gauss, Carl Friedrich (1777-1855) | Gauss was the only child of poor parents. He became a great German mathematician, famous both during and after his lifetime. His first major discovery, in 1792, was that a regular polygon of 17 sides could be constructed using only a ruler and a compass. Gauss made a real breakthrough with the discovery of the normal distribution.
However, it was an earlier mathematician called Abraham de Moivre who first wrote down the formula now known as the Gaussian distribution in the late 18th century (normal distribution). | |
| Glaser, Barney Galland (1930 – 2022), Grounded Theory | Barney Glaser co-discovered Grounded Theory in the early 1960s while studying dying in hospitals. Born and raised in San Francisco, he attended Stanford University for his undergraduate degree and later Columbia University for his PhD. Glaser focused much of his life on teaching grounded theory and mentoring novice and experienced grounded theorists. He founded the Grounded Theory Institute, the Sociology Press, and the Grounded Theory Review. Strauss and Glaser's landmark 1967 book paved the way for the integration of methodologically conducted interviews into sociological research. Glaser and Strauss built on a number of approaches that had already been explored, but their work had a far-reaching impact on the field and led to a shift in the role that interviews have played in research since, creating a whole new field of scholarship. He died of complications from Parkinson's disease at the age of 91. | |
| Hume, David (1711-1776) | Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist and essayist. Hume tried to describe how the human mind works in the acquisition of knowledge. He is known for his three criteria of causality, written down in his treatise on human nature. To paraphrase his words, causality is continuous in space and time, the cause is prior to the effect, and there is a constant connection between cause and effect. In other words, we define causality in terms of temporal connections ("if this - then that") and similarities and dissimilarities. | |
| Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804 – Age of reason) | Kant was a German philosopher and one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. His work covered the fields of epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. He paved the way for atheism and a new way of philosophical thinking by arguing that reason is the source of morality. Reason can be understood as the human ability to think about what one ought to do. Kant distinguished between the analytic and the synthetic. | |
| Kuhn, Thomas Samuel (1922 - 1996 - After the wars, Social Paradigms) | Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science. In his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he introduced a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. In scientific discourse, the term 'paradigm' was coined by Kuhn in the 1960s. Kuhn described scientific paradigms as "universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners". The development of science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions. Kuhn called the successive transition from one paradigm to the next the maturation process of science. | |
| Laudan, Larry (1941-2022 – Social Paradigms) | Laudan coined the term ‘History of Ideas’, which he used instead of the history of disciplines or scientists. He criticized the focus on elites and disciplines in the history of science and saw disciplinary boundaries as less strict. In the ‘History of Ideas’, Laudan emphasized that many people had similar ideas and that ideas can break through realities, asking the key question of what is real and what was real in the past. Laudan also distinguished between 'cognitive and non-cognitive aspects', claiming that science is not always done in a rational manner. People are not rational and therefore also scientists act irrationally and not reasonably. We should be aware of their individual responsibility and that we cannot understand every decision scientists make. | |
| Locke, John (1632-1704) | John Locke was a British philosopher, Oxford academic and medical researcher. The idea of the social contract, that societies agree on a set of moral obligations, was strongly influenced by Locke. In his monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), he argued that human knowledge is based on experience. Opposition to authoritarianism, both individual and institutional, characterizes much of Locke's work. He also supports the idea that the use of reason in attempting to grasp the truth and analyze the legitimate functions of institutions will lead to human flourishing for the individual and society. | |
| Marx, Karl (1818-1883) | Marx is often treated as a revolutionary and activist rather than a philosopher. As a person and in his work, he made an important step towards a critical perspective by pointing out the critique of society and capitalism. He developed philosophy from an inquiry of worldviews towards an agenda for creating change, focusing primarily on the economic system. It could be said that he opened up a new empirical dimension, although he did not elaborate on a methodological approach. The earliest relevant recognition of the global scale and the link with inequality came from Marx. | |
| Meadows, Donella (1941-2001) | A key publication in the field of systems thinking was Thinking in Systems (2008) by Donella Meadows, who had previously co-authored the landmark 1972 report Limits to Growth. It was Meadows who coined the puzzling phrase 'dance with the system'. She was a main contributor to the concept of leverage points, which are places where you can intervene in a system. These interventions have the potential to shift the status quo towards sustainability and are therefore discussed in sustainability science. | |
| Mercator, Gerhard (1512-1594) (Before the age of reason) | Mercator was a Flemish cartographer whose most important innovation was a map that came to be known as the Mercator projection. This type of projection is a conformal cylindrical map projection that preserves the size and shape of areas.
The Mercator map enabled colonialism, western domination and control of the world by facilitating a clear navigation across the oceans. These capabilities drastically influenced the development of Western society. | |
| Newton, Isaac (around 1642-1727) (Age of reason) | Newton was an English physicist and mathematician. He is probably best known for his formulation of the three laws of motion - the basic principles of modern physics.
Although his main focus was on physics, he combined several fields: mathematics, astronomy, natural philosophy, engineering and optics. Newton can also be associated with thought experiments that combine theoretical considerations with a systematic reflection on the natural world. | |
| Of Ockham, William (1287-1347) (Before the age of reason) | You have probably heard of Occam's razor, which can be traced back to the Franciscan philosopher, theologian, and political writer William of Ockham.
It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer. So always try to use the following heuristic: everything should be as simple as possible and as complex as necessary. | |
| Ostrom, Elinor (1933-2012) | Ostrom, a political scientist, developed the Ostrom framework (theory of the commons), which provides a systems perspective on resource issues.
Ostrom challenged the idea that natural resources shared by their users would be overexploited and destroyed in the long term (tragedy of the commons). Her work showed that when natural resources are shared by their users, rules are established over time about how to care for and use the resources in ways that are sustainable. This kind of management occurs without government or private control. Ostrom made history in 2009 when she became the first woman to win the prestigious Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Her Google Scholar profile shows that she has been cited a remarkable 267012 times ( status January 2025). | |
| Parfit, Derek (1942-2017) | Derek Parfit is one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. His work on normative ethics is considered his most important. Parfit has also worked on metaethics, personal identity, and the theory of practical reason.
Two major works are Reasons and Persons, published in 1984, and On What Matters, published in three volumes between 2011 and 2017. Parfit argues that it is our responsibility to understand and act as human beings and that if philosophy is a mountain, Western philosophy climbs it from three sides: utilitarianism, the social contract, and reason. Many ethical thought experiments became popular in the 20th century, and Derek Parfit is a prominent example of how these experiments are used to illustrate and argue cases and examples within ethics. | |
| Pearson, Karl (1857-1936) | Pearson invented the Pearson’s correlation coefficient, which is the most popular one next to Spearman’s and Kendall’s rank correlation coefficient. Pearson is known as the enemy of R.A. Fisher. While Fisher took a deductive approach to mathematics, Pearson took an inductive one.
He was the editor of the journal Biometrika. For Pearson, the real “things” of science were not things that could be observed but mathematical functions that described the randomness of what we could see. In his work he proposed four parameters of a distribution: the mean, the standard deviation, symmetry and kurtosis (how far rare measurements scatter from the mean). Pearson saw and treated subordinates and students as extensions of his own will. He believed that by identifying the four parameters and collecting enough data, the estimates of the parameters would give true values. This is not true because you can never really determine these parameters, you can only make estimates. Fisher proved that some of Pearson's estimation methods were not optimal. The articles in Biometrika were influenced and deeply biased by Pearson and his opinions and general interests over a long period of time. | |
| Popper, Karl (1902-1994 - After the wars, Social Paradigms) | Popper was a social and political philosopher and the founder of critical rationalism. His falsificationism is an important principle of scientific work and highlights the imperfection of experiments in testing. Karl Popper emphasized that facts can only be approximated, i.e. they can only be considered true as long as they are not falsified. He proposed a form of pluralistic realism, namely a ‘three worlds’ ontology consisting of the physical world, the mind world and human knowledge. | |
| Strauss, Anselm Leonard (1916 – 1996), Grounded Theory | Anselm L. Strauss was internationally known as a medical sociologist (especially for his pioneering attention to chronic illness and dying) and as the developer (with Barney Glaser) of Grounded Theory, an innovative method of qualitative analysis widely used in sociology, nursing, education, social work and organizational studies. Strauss and Glaser's landmark 1967 book paved the way for the integration of methodologically conducted interviews into sociological research. Although Glaser and Strauss built on a number of previously explored approaches, they triggered a major shift in the field and, given the role that interviews have played in research since then, created an entirely new arena of scholarship. Strauss also wrote extensively on Chicago sociology/symbolic interactionism, sociology of work, social worlds/arena theory, social psychology and urban imagery. Before his death, he was chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Many of Strauss's books are still in print, and his work has been translated into eight other languages. |
References[edit]
Hume, D. 1739. "A Treatise of Human Nature"
Parfit, D. (2011). *On what matters.* Oxford University Press.
Parfit, D. (1984). *Reasons and persons*. OUP Oxford.
Where to find the information[edit]
https://groundedtheoryreview.com/
https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html
Salsburg, D. (2001). “The Lady Tasting Tea - How statistics revolutionized science in the twentieth century”. ISBN: 978-0-8050-7134-4
The Wiki. https://sustainabilitymethods.org/index.php/Main_Page
The author of this glossary is Joanna Knecht.