Whewell William (1794–1866), English historian, astronomer, and philosopher of science. He was a master of Trinity College, Cambridge (1841–66). Francis Bacon’s early work on induction was furthered by Whewell, J. F. W. Herschel, and J. S. Mill, who attempted to create a logic of induction, a methodology that can both discover generalizations about experience and prove them to be necessary.
Whewell’s theory of scientific method is based on his reading of the history of the inductive sciences. He thought that induction began with a non-inferential act, the superimposition of an idea on data, a ‘colligation,’ a way of seeing facts in a ‘new light.’ Colligations generalize over data, and must satisfy three ‘tests of truth.’ First, colligations must be empirically adequate; they must account for the given data. Any number of ideas may be adequate to explain given data, so a more severe test is required. Second, because colligations introduce generalizations, they must apply to events or properties of objects not yet given: they must provide successful predictions, thereby enlarging the evidence in favor of the colligation. Third, the best inductions are those where evidence for various hypotheses originally thought to cover unrelated kinds of data ‘jumps together,’ providing a consilience of inductions. Consilience characterizes those theories achieving large measures of simplicity, generality, unification, and deductive strength. Furthermore, consilience is a test of the necessary truth of theories, which implies that what many regard as merely pragmatic virtues of theories like simplicity and unifying force have an epistemic status. Whewell thus provides a strong argument for scientific realism. Whewell’s examples of consilient theories are Newton’s theory of universal gravitation, which covers phenomena as seemingly diverse as the motions of the heavenly bodies and the motions of the tides, and the undulatory theory of light, which explains both the polarization of light by crystals and the colors of fringes. There is evidence that Whewell’s methodology was employed by Maxwell, who designed the influential Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge. Peirce and Mach favored Whewell’s account of method over Mill’s empiricist theory of induction.
See also EXPLANATION, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENC. R.E.B.