A Man Recorded Only as a Result

Pearce is a useful case for anyone thinking about how this literature is built, because the record preserves his scores in great detail and almost nothing else. Papers about him run to trial counts, hit rates and deviations expressed to several decimal places, alongside careful diagrams of which room he sat in. His dates of birth and death, his later career, and what he himself thought about any of it are not established in the standard sources, and this atlas records no lifespan for him because it could not verify one. That imbalance is not an accident of archiving.

The Duke programme's whole argument was that the subject's personality and biography were irrelevant, that what mattered was whether the arithmetic departed from chance under stated conditions, and the reporting conventions followed from the argument. The cost is that the single most cited experimental subject in the history of the field is, in the literature, a column of numbers. The most substantial later engagement with him is hostile: C. E. M. Hansel reconstructed the buildings involved in the distance series and argued that the layout left a route by which Pearce could have observed the cards, a reconstruction Rhine and Pratt rejected in detail. Even that argument is about the building, not the man.