William Whewell
(1794-1866)
William Whewell was a philosopher and theologian who worked with or influenced many prominent scientists (he actually coined the term "scientist") in the early nineteenth century, including
Charles Darwin, John Herschel, Charles Lyell, and Michael Faraday. He opposed the views of the British empiricists
John Locke and
David Hume that all knowledge comes through the senses (Locke's "blank slate" theory of the mind).
In 1837 Whewell published a 3-volume
History of the Inductive Sciences and followed it a few years later with
The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, founded upon their history.
John Stuart Mill accepted Whewell as an important antagonist and reformulated many of his positions in the final draft of his
System of Logic to refute Whewell's views on the "Inductive Sciences."
Whewell defended a variation on the Platonic Ideas and the Kantian noumenal realm where concepts like space and time could provide the mind with built-in concepts independent of any experience. He called these the
Fundamental Ideas and called them the "grounds for universal and necessary truths." In addition to space and time, they included
causality, which Hume said was a "
natural" belief, although one that could not be
proved by induction. They also included concepts like triangles, numbers, and force.
Where empiricism emphasizes perceptions and "sense-data," Whewell's philosophy is a form of idealism that defends general terms like a circle or a rose as more than mere "names" for the objects behind our perceptions (as Mill and the Scholastic "nominalists" claimed). Nor are they "images" of "real things" as claimed by the
realists.
Whewell summarized his view in brief aphorisms concerning Ideas:
LXXXIII. We collect individuals into kinds by applying to them the Idea of Likeness. Kinds of things are not determined by definition, but by this condition; - that general assertions concerning such kinds of things shall be possible.
LXXXIV. The names of things are governed by their use; and that may be a right name in one use which is not so in another. A whale is not a fish in natural history, but it is a fish in commerce and law.
(The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, p.xxxi)
Whewell's view of inductive science is sophisticated. It is not the induction of simple enumeration, as in "All swans we have seen are white. Therefore, all swans are white." Instead, he calls it a "Colligation of Facts."
From Whewell's brief aphorisms concerning Science:
VIII. The Conceptions by which Facts are bound together are suggested by the sagacity of discoverers. This sagacity cannot be taught. It commonly succeeds by guessing; and this success seems to consist in framing several tentative hypotheses and selecting the right one. But a supply of appropriate hypotheses cannot be constructed by rule, nor without inventive talent.
IX. The truth of tentative hypotheses must be tested by their application to facts.
The discoverer must be ready, carefully to try his hypotheses in this manner, and to reject them if they will not bear the test.
(The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, p.xxxviii)
Now although Whewell coined the term "hypothetic-deductive" for his inductive science, and thought Francis Bacon did not use simple induction, he did not think that hypotheses could come from anywhere, including chance guesses or conjectures (τοπάζω), as did
Charles Sanders Peirce, for example.
Whewell disagreed with the empiricists on the Ideas, but he agreed with them that "nothing happens by chance" (Ideas aphorism CV) and "no discovery is the work of accident" (Science aphorism III).
For Whewell, as perhaps for Bacon, the philosophy of science implies "nothing less than a complete insight into the essence and conditions of all real knowledge, and an exposition of the best methods for the discovery of new truths." (
Inductive Sciences, p.3)