Necessary Truth in Whewell’s Theory of Science

Abstract

William Whewell's fifty-year long career as scientist and historian and philosopher of science was in many ways a perverse one. In keeping with his training, his interests, and the most influential intellectual trends of his age, Whewell should have been a philosophical empiricist.1 His own work in science was for the most part of the most narrow empirical kind. He collected and classified minerals, attempted to measure the density of the earth at the bottom of Dolcoath coal mine shaft, made a monumental descriptive study of the tides off the coast of England, invented an instrument, called an 'anemometer,' for measuring the force and direction of the wind, and prepared detailed notes on the architecture of German churches. The tenor of the intellectual times in Britain was also clearly empirical: the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill rose to popularity; in Scotland Dougald Stewart continued to develop the fortunes of Scottish common sense empiricism; William Hamilton loudly proclaimed the virtues of his variety of empiricism; and even in Cambridge great friends of Whewell—like Sir John Herschel—championed a different variation on empiricism. Yet, in spite of what his own scientific work and the philosophical tendencies of his age might have suggested to him, Whewell's philosophy of science emerged as one of the last great rationalist systems, complete with a metaphysics, a theology, and a theory of morals. In its finished or nearly finished form, Whewell's philosophy was, in Britain at least, an anomaly. For his system was, in its basic features and in many of its details, much more like the systems of Leibniz and other seventeenth-century rationalists than like those of his British contemporaries.2