## 1. Biography



Whewell was born in 1794, the eldest child of a master-carpenter in
Lancaster. The headmaster of his local grammar school, a parish
priest, recognized Whewell's intellectual abilities and
persuaded his father to allow him to attend the Heversham Grammar
School in Westmorland, some twelve miles to the north, where he would
be able to qualify for a closed exhibition to Trinity College,
Cambridge. In the 19th century and earlier, these "closed
exhibitions" or scholarships were set aside for the children of
working class parents, to allow for some social mobility. Whewell
studied at Heversham Grammar for two years, and received private
coaching in mathematics. Although he did win the exhibition it did not
provide full resources for a boy of his family's means to attend
Cambridge; so money had to be raised in a public subscription to
supplement the scholarship money.



He thus came up to Trinity in 1812 as a "sub-sizar"
(scholarship student). In 1814 he won the Chancellor's prize for
his epic poem "Boadicea," in this way following in the
footsteps of his mother, Elizabeth Whewell, who had published poems in
the local papers. Yet he did not neglect the mathematical side of his
training; in 1816 he proved his mathematical prowess by placing as
both second Wrangler and second Smith's Prize man. The following
year he won a college fellowship. He was elected to the Royal Society
in 1820, and ordained a priest (as required for Trinity Fellows) in
1825. He took up the Chair in Mineralogy in 1828, and resigned it in
1832. In 1838 Whewell became Professor of Moral Philosophy. Almost
immediately after his marriage to Cordelia Marshall on 12 October
1841, he was named Master of Trinity College upon the recommendation
of the Prime Minister Robert Peel. He was Vice-Chancellor of the
University in 1842 and again in 1855. In 1848 he played a large role
in establishing the Natural and Moral Sciences Triposes at the
University. His first wife died in 1855, and he later married Lady
Evalina Affleck, the widowed sister of his friend Robert Ellis. Lady
Affleck died in 1865. Whewell had no children. He died, after being
thrown from his horse, on 6 March 1866. (More details about
Whewell's life and times can be found in Snyder 2011.)


## 2. Philosophy of Science: Induction



According to Whewell, all knowledge has both an ideal, or subjective
dimension, as well as an objective dimension. He called this the
"fundamental antithesis" of knowledge. Whewell explained
that "in every act of knowledge ... there are two opposite
elements, which we may call Ideas and Perceptions" (1860a, 307).
He criticized Kant and the German Idealists for their exclusive focus
on the ideal or subjective element, and Locke and the
"Sensationalist School" for their exclusive focus on the
empirical, objective element. Like Francis Bacon, Whewell claimed to
be seeking a "middle way" between pure rationalism and
ultra-empiricism. Whewell believed that gaining knowledge requires
attention to both ideal and empirical elements, to ideas as well as
sensations. These ideas, which he called "Fundamental
Ideas," are "supplied by the mind itself"--they
are not (as Mill and Herschel protested) merely received from our
observations of the world. Whewell explained that the Fundamental
Ideas are "not a consequence of experience, but a result of the
particular constitution and activity of the mind, which is independent
of all experience in its origin, though constantly combined with
experience in its exercise" (1858a, I, 91). Consequently, the
mind is an active participant in our attempts to gain knowledge of the
world, not merely a passive recipient of sense data. Ideas such as
Space, Time, Cause, and Resemblance provide a structure or form for
the multitude of sensations we experience. The Ideas provide a
structure by expressing the general relations that exist between our
sensations (1847, I, 25). Thus, the Idea of Space allows us to
apprehend objects as having form, magnitude, and position. Whewell
held, then, that observation is "idea-laden;" all
observation, he noted, involves "unconscious inference"
using the Fundamental Ideas (see 1858a, I, 46). Each science has a
Particular Fundamental idea which is needed to organize the facts with
which that science is concerned; thus, Space is the Fundamental Idea
of geometry, Cause the Fundamental Idea of mechanics, and Substance
the Fundamental Idea of chemistry. Moreover, Whewell explained that
each Fundamental Idea has certain "conceptions" included
within it; these conceptions are "special modifications"
of the Idea applied to particular types of circumstances (1858b, 187).
For example, the conception of force is a modification of the Idea of
Cause, applied to the particular case of motion (see 1858a, I,
184-5 and 236).



Thus far, this discussion of the Fundamental Ideas may suggest that
they are similar to Kant's forms of intuition, and indeed there
are some similarities. Because of this, some commentators have argued
that Whewell's epistemology is a type of Kantianism (see, for
example, Butts 1973; Buchdahl 1991). However, this interpretation
ignores several crucial differences between the two views. Whewell did
not follow Kant in drawing a distinction between
"precepts," or forms of intuition, such as Space and Time,
and the categories, or forms of thought, in which Kant included the
concepts of Cause and Substance. Moreover, Whewell included as
Fundamental Ideas many ideas which function not as conditions of
experience but as conditions for having knowledge within their
respective sciences: although it is certainly possible to have
experience of the world without having a distinct idea of, say,
Chemical Affinity, we could not have any knowledge of certain chemical
processes without it. Unlike Kant, Whewell did not attempt to give an
exhaustive list of these Fundamental Ideas; indeed, he believed that
there are others which will emerge in the course of the development of
science. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly for his philosophy of
science, Whewell rejected Kant's claim that we can only have
knowledge of our "categorized experience." The Fundamental
Ideas, on Whewell's view, accurately represent objective
features of the world, independent of the processes of the mind, and
we can use these Ideas in order to have knowledge of these objective
features. Indeed, Whewell criticized Kant for viewing external reality
as a "dim and unknown region" (see 1860a, 312). Further,
Whewell's justification for the presence of these concepts in
our minds takes a very different form than Kant's transcendental
argument. For Kant, the categories are justified because they make
experience possible. For Whewell, though the categories *do*
make experience (of certain kinds) possible, the Ideas are justified
by their origin in the mind of a divine creator (see especially his
discussion of this in his 1860a). And finally, the type of necessity
which Whewell claimed is derived from the Ideas is very different from
Kant's notion of the synthetic *a priori* (For a nuanced
view of the relation between the views of Kant and Whewell, see
Ducheyne 2011.) I return to these last two points in the section on
Necessary Truth below.



I turn now to a discussion of the theory of induction Whewell
developed with his antithetical epistemology. From his earliest
thoughts about scientific method, Whewell was interested in developing
an inductive theory. At their philosophical breakfasts at Cambridge,
Whewell, Babbage, Herschel and Jones discussed how science had
stagnated since the heady days of the Scientific Revolution in the
17th century. It was time for a new revolution, which they pledged to
bring about. The cornerstone of this new revolution was to be the
promotion of a Baconian-type of induction, and all four men began
their careers endorsing an inductive scientific method against the
deductive method then being advanced by political economist David
Ricardo, logician Richard Whately, and their followers (see Snyder
2011). (Although the four friends agreed about the importance of an
inductive scientific method, Herschel and Jones would late take issue
with some aspects of Whewell's version, notably his antithetical
epistemology.)



Whewell's first explicit, lengthy discussion of induction is
found in his *Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, founded upon
their History*, which was originally published in 1840 (a second,
enlarged edition appeared in 1847, and the third edition appeared as
three separate works published between 1858 and 1860). He called his
induction "Discoverers' Induction" and explained
that it is used to discover both phenomenal and causal laws. Whewell
considered himself to be a follower of Bacon, and claimed to be
"renovating" Bacon's inductive method; thus one
volume of the third edition of the *Philosophy* is entitled
*Novum Organon Renovatum*. Whewell followed Bacon in rejecting
the standard, overly-narrow notion of induction that holds induction
to be merely simple enumeration of instances. Rather, Whewell
explained that, in induction, "there is a New Element added to
the combination [of instances] by the very act of thought by which
they were combined" (1847, II, 48). This "act of
thought" is a process Whewell called "colligation."
Colligation, according to Whewell, is the mental operation of bringing
together a number of empirical facts by "superinducing"
upon them a conception which unites the facts and renders them capable
of being expressed by a general law. The conception thus provides the
"true bond of Unity by which the phenomena are held
together" (1847, II, 46), by providing a property shared by the
known members of a class (in the case of causal laws, the colligating
property is that of sharing the same cause).



Thus the known points of the Martian orbit were colligated by Kepler
using the conception of an elliptical curve. Often new discoveries are
made, Whewell pointed out, not when new facts are discovered but when
the appropriate conception is applied to the facts. In the case of
Kepler's discovery, the observed points of the orbit were known
to Tycho Brahe, but only when Kepler applied the ellipse conception
was the true path of the orbit discovered. Kepler was the first one to
apply this conception to an orbital path in part because he had, in
his mind, a very clear notion of the conception of an ellipse. This is
important because the fundamental ideas and conceptions are provided
by our minds, but they cannot be used in their innate form. Whewell
explained that "the Ideas, the germs of them at least, were in
the human mind before [experience]; but by the progress of scientific
thought they are unfolded into clearness and distinctness"
(1860a, 373). Whewell referred to this "unfolding" of
ideas and conceptions as the "explication of conceptions."
Explication is a necessary precondition to discovery, and it consists
in a partly empirical, partly rational process. Scientists first try
to clarify and make explicit a conception in their minds, then attempt
to apply it to the facts they have precisely examined, to determine
whether the conception can colligate the facts into a law. If not, the
scientist uses this experience to attempt a further refinement of the
conception. Whewell claimed that a large part of the history of
science is the "history of scientific ideas," that is, the
history of their explication and subsequent use as colligating
concepts. Thus, in the case of Kepler's use of the ellipse
conception, Whewell noted that "to supply this conception,
required a special preparation, and a special activity in the mind of
the discoverer. ... To discover such a connection, the mind must
be conversant with certain relations of space, and with certain kinds
of figures" (1849, 28-9).



Once conceptions have been explicated, it is possible to choose the
appropriate conception with which to colligate phenomena. But how is
the appropriate conception chosen? According to Whewell, it is not a
matter of guesswork. Nor, importantly, is it merely a matter of
observation. Whewell explained that "there is a special process
in the mind, in addition to the mere observation of facts, which is
necessary" (1849, 40). This "special process in the
mind" is a process of inference. "We infer more than we
see," Whewell claimed (1858a, I, 46). Typically, finding the
appropriate conception with which to colligate a class of phenomena
requires a series of inferences, thus Whewell noted that
discoverers's induction is a process involving a "train of
researches" (1857/1873, I, 297). He allowed any type of
inference in the colligation, including enumerative, eliminative and
analogical. Thus Kepler in his *Astronomia Nova* (1609) can be
seen as using various forms of inference to reach the ellipse
conception (see Snyder 1997a). When Augustus DeMorgan complained, in
his 1847 logic text, about certain writers using the term
"induction" as including "the use of the whole box
of [logical] tools," he was undoubtedly referring to his teacher
and friend Whewell (see Snyder 2008).



After the known members of a class are colligated with the use of a
conception, the second step of Whewell's discoverers'
induction occurs: namely, the generalization of the shared property
over the complete class, including its unknown members. Often, as
Whewell admitted, this is a trivially simple procedure. Once Kepler
supplied the conception of an ellipse to the observed members of the
class of Mars' positions, he generalized it to all members of
the class, including those which were unknown (unobserved), to reach
the conclusion that "all the points of Mars' orbit lie on
an ellipse with the sun at one focus." He then performed a
further generalization to reach his first law of planetary motion:
"the orbits of all the planets lie on ellipses with the sun at
one focus."



I've mentioned that Whewell thought of himself as renovating
Bacon's inductive philosophy. His inductivism does share
numerous features with Bacon's method of interpreting nature:
for instance the claims that induction must involve more than merely
simple enumeration of instances, that science must proceed by
successive steps of generalization, that inductive science can reach
unobservables (for Bacon, the "forms," for Whewell,
unobservable entities such as light waves or properties such as
elliptical orbits or gravitational forces). (For more on the relation
between Whewell and Bacon see Snyder 2006; McCaskey 2014.) Yet,
surprisingly, the received view of Whewell's methodology in the
20th century tended to describe Whewell as an anti-inductivist in the
Popperian mold. (see, for example, Ruse 1975; Niiniluoto 1977; Laudan
1980; Butts 1987; Buchdahl 1991). That is, it was claimed that Whewell
endorsed a "conjectures and refutations" view of
scientific discovery. However, it is clear from the above discussion
that his view of discoverers' induction does not resemble the
view asserting that hypotheses can be and are typically arrived at by
mere guesswork. Indeed, Whewell explicitly rejected the
hypothetico-deductive claim that hypotheses discovered by non-rational
guesswork can be confirmed by consequentialist testing. For example,
in his review of his friend Herschel's *Preliminary Discourse
on the Study of Natural Philosophy*, Whewell argued, against
Herschel, that verification is not possible when a hypothesis has been
formed non-inductively (1831, 400-1). Nearly thirty years later,
in the last edition of the *Philosophy*, Whewell referred to
the belief that "the discovery of laws and causes of phenomena
is a loose hap-hazard sort of guessing," and claimed that this
type of view "appears to me to be a misapprehension of the whole
nature of science" (1860a, 274). In other mature works he noted
that discoveries are made "not by any capricious conjecture of
arbitrary selection" (1858a, I, 29) and explained that new
hypotheses are properly "collected from the facts" (1849,
17). In fact, Whewell was criticized by his contemporary David
Brewster for *not* agreeing that discoveries, including
Newton's discovery of the universal gravitation law, were
typically made by accident.



Why has Whewell been misinterpreted by so many modern commentators?
One reason has to do with the error of reading certain terms used by
Whewell in the 19th century as if they held the same meaning they have
in the 20th and 21st. Thus, since Whewell used the terms
"conjectures" and "guesses," some writers
believe that he shares Popper's methodology. Whewell made
mention, for instance, of the "happy guesses" made by
scientists (1858b, 64) and claimed that "advances in
knowledge" often follow "the previous exercise of some
boldness and license in guessing" (1847, II, 55). But Whewell
generally used these terms to connote a conclusion that is not (yet)
conclusively confirmed. The *Oxford English Dictionary* tells
us that prior to the 20th century the term "conjecture"
was used to connote not a hypothesis reached by non-rational means,
but rather one which is "unverified," or which is "a
conclusion as to what is likely or probable" (as opposed to the
results of demonstration). The term was used this way by Bacon,
Kepler, Newton, and Dugald Stewart, writers whose work was well-known
to Whewell. In other places where Whewell used the term
"conjecture" he suggests that what appears to be the
result of guesswork is actually what we might call an "educated
guess," i.e., a conclusion drawn by (weak) inference. Whewell
described Kepler's discovery, which seems so "capricious
and fanciful" as actually being "regulated" by his
"clear scientific ideas" (1857/1873, I, 291-2).
Finally, Whewell's use of the terminology of guessing sometimes
occurs in the context of a distinction he draws between the generation
of a number of possible conceptions, and the selection of one to
superinduce upon the facts. Before the appropriate conception is
found, the scientist must be able to call up in his mind a number of
possible ones (see 1858b, 79). Whewell noted that this calling up of
many possibilities "is, in some measure, a process of
conjecture." However, selecting the appropriate conception with
which to colligate the data is not conjectural (1858b, 78). Thus
Whewell claimed that the selection of the conception is often
"*preluded* by guesses" (1858b, xix); he does not,
that is, claim that the selection *consists* in guesswork. When
inference is not used to select the appropriate conception, the
resulting theory is not an "induction," but rather a
"hasty and imperfect hypothesis." He drew such a
distinction between Copernicus' heliocentric theory, which he
called an induction, and the heliocentric system proposed by
Aristarchus in the third century BCE to which he referred as a hasty
and imperfect hypothesis (1857/1873, I, 258).



Thus Whewell's philosophy of science cannot be described as the
hypothetico-deductive view. It is an inductive method; yet it clearly
differs from the more narrow inductivism of Mill. Whewell's view
of induction has the advantage over Mill's of allowing the
inference to unobservable properties and entities, and for this reason
is a more accurate view of how science works. (For more detailed
arguments against reading Whewell as a hypothetico-deductivist, see
Snyder 2006; Snyder 2008; McCaskey 2014).


## 3. Philosophy of Science: Confirmation



On Whewell's view, once a theory is invented by
discoverers' induction, it must pass a variety of tests before
it can be considered confirmed as an empirical truth. These tests are
prediction, consilience, and coherence (see 1858b, 83-96). These
are characterized by Whewell as, first, that "our hypotheses
ought to *fortel* [sic] phenomena which have not yet been
observed" (1858b, 86); second, that they should "explain
and determine cases of a *kind different* from those which were
contemplated in the formation" of those hypotheses (1858b, 88);
and third that hypotheses must "become more coherent" over
time (1858b, 91).



I start by discussing the criterion of prediction. Hypotheses ought to
foretell phenomena, "at least all phenomena of the same
kind," Whewell explained, because "our assent to the
hypothesis implies that it is held to be true of all particular
instances. That these cases belong to past or to future times, that
they have or have not already occurred, makes no difference in the
applicability of the rule to them. Because the rule prevails, it
includes all cases" (1858b, 86). Whewell's point here is
simply that since our hypotheses are in universal form, a true
hypothesis will cover all particular instances of the rule, including
past, present, and future cases. But he also makes the stronger claim
that successful predictions of unknown facts provide greater
confirmatory value than explanations of already-known facts. Thus he
held the historical claim that "new evidence" is more
valuable than "old evidence." He believed that "to
predict unknown facts found afterwards to be true is ... a
confirmation of a theory which in impressiveness and value goes beyond
any explanation of known facts" (1857/1873, II, 557). Whewell
claimed that the agreement of the prediction with what occurs (i.e.,
the fact that the prediction turns out to be correct), is
"nothing strange, if the theory be true, but quite
unaccountable, if it be not" (1860a, 273-4). For example,
if Newtonian theory were not true, he argued, the fact that from the
theory we could correctly predict the existence, location and mass of
a new planet, Neptune (as did happen in 1846), would be bewildering,
and indeed miraculous.



An even more valuable confirmation criterion, according to Whewell, is
that of "consilience." Whewell explained that "the
evidence in favour of our induction is of a much higher and more
forcible character when it enables us to explain and determine [i.e.,
predict] cases of a *kind different* from those which were
contemplated in the formation of our hypothesis. The instances in
which this have occurred, indeed, impress us with a conviction that
the truth of our hypothesis is certain" (1858b, 87-8).
Whewell called this type of evidence a "jumping together"
or "consilience" of inductions. An induction, which
results from the colligation of one class of facts, is found also to
colligate successfully facts belonging to another class.
Whewell's notion of consilience is thus related to his view of
natural classes of objects or events.



To understand this confirmation criterion, it may be helpful to
schematize the "jumping together" that occurred in the
case of Newton's law of universal gravitation, Whewell's
exemplary case of consilience. On Whewell's view, Newton used
the form of inference Whewell characterized as
"discoverers' induction" in order to reach his
universal gravitation law, the inverse-square law of attraction. Part
of this process is portrayed in book III of the *Principia*,
where Newton listed a number of "propositions." These
propositions are empirical laws that are inferred from certain
"phenomena" (which are described in the preceding section
of book III). The first such proposition or law is that "the
forces by which the circumjovial planets are continually drawn off
from rectilinear motions, and retained in their proper orbits, tend to
Jupiter's centre; and are inversely as the squares of the
distances of the places of those planets from that centre." The
result of another, separate induction from the phenomena of
"planetary motion" is that "the forces by which the
primary planets are continually drawn off from rectilinear motions,
and retained in their proper orbits, tend to the sun; and are
inversely as the squares of the distances of the places of those
planets from the sun's centre." Newton saw that these
laws, as well as other results of a number of different inductions,
coincided in postulating the existence of an inverse-square attractive
force as the cause of various classes of phenomena. According to
Whewell, Newton saw that these inductions "leap to the same
point;" i.e., to the same law. Newton was then able to bring
together inductively (or "colligate") these laws, and
facts of other kinds of events (e.g., the class of events known as
"falling bodies"), into a new, more general law, namely
the universal gravitation law: "All bodies attract each other
with a force of gravity which is inverse as the squares of the
distances." By seeing that an inverse-square attractive force
provided a cause for different classes of events--for satellite
motion, planetary motion, and falling bodies--Newton was able to
perform a more general induction, to his universal law.



What Newton found was that these different kinds of
phenomena--including circumjovial orbits, planetary orbits, as
well as falling bodies--share an essential property, namely the
same cause. What Newton did, in effect, was to subsume these
individual "event kinds" into a more general natural kind
comprised of sub-kinds sharing a kind essence, namely being caused by
an inverse-square attractive force. Consilience of event kinds
therefore results in *causal unification*. More specifically,
it results in unification of natural kind categories based on a shared
cause. Phenomena that constitute different event kinds, such as
"planetary motion," "tidal activity," and
"falling bodies," were found by Newton to be members of a
unified, more general kind, "phenomena caused to occur by an
inverse-square attractive force of gravity" (or,
"gravitational phenomena"). In such cases, according to
Whewell, we learn that we have found a "vera causa," or a
"true cause," i.e., a cause that really exists in nature,
and whose effects are members of the same natural kind (see 1860a, p.
191). Moreover, by finding a cause shared by phenomena in different
sub-kinds, we are able to colligate all the facts about these kinds
into a more general causal law. Whewell claimed that "when the
theory, by the concurrences of two indications ... has included a
new range of phenomena, we have, in fact, a new induction of a more
general kind, to which the inductions formerly obtained are
subordinate, as particular cases to a general population"
(1858b, 96). He noted that consilience is the means by which we effect
the successive generalization that constitutes the advancement of
science (1847, II, 74). (For early discussions of consilience see
Laudan 1971 and, especially, Hesse 1968 and Hesse 1971; for more on
consilience and its relation to realism and natural kinds, see Snyder
2005 and Snyder 2006. On consilience and classification, see Quinn,
2017. For more on Whewell and scientific kinds, see Cowles 2016.)



Whewell discussed a further, related test of a theory's truth:
namely, "coherence." In the case of true theories, Whewell
claimed, "the system becomes more coherent as it is further
extended. The elements which we require for explaining a new class of
facts are already contained in our system....In false theories,
the contrary is the case" (1858b, 91). Coherence occurs when we
are able to extend our hypothesis to colligate a new class of
phenomena without ad hoc modification of the hypothesis. When Newton
extended his theory regarding an inverse-square attractive force,
which colligated facts of planetary motion and lunar motion, to the
class of "tidal activity," he did not need to add any new
suppositions to the theory in order to colligate correctly the facts
about particular tides. On the other hand, Whewell explained, when
phlogiston theory, which colligated facts about the class of phenomena
"chemical combination," was extended to colligate the
class of phenomena "weight of bodies," it was
*unable* to do so without an ad hoc and implausible
modification (namely, the assumption that phlogiston has
"negative weight") (see 1858b, 92-3). Thus coherence
can be seen as a type of consilience that happens over time; indeed,
Whewell remarked that these two criteria--consilience and
coherence--"are, in fact, hardly different" (1858b,
95).


## 4. Philosophy of Science: Necessary Truth



A particularly intriguing aspect of Whewell's philosophy of
science is his claim that empirical science can reach necessary
truths. Explaining this apparently contradictory claim was considered
by Whewell to be the "ultimate problem" of philosophy (see
the important paper by Morrison 1997). Whewell accounted for it by
reference to his antithetical epistemology. Necessary truths are
truths which can be known *a priori*; they can be known in this
way because they are necessary consequences of ideas which are *a
priori*. They are necessary consequences in the sense of being
analytic consequences. Whewell explicitly rejected Kant's claim
that necessary truths are synthetic. Using the example "7 + 8 =
15," Whewell claimed that "we refer to our conceptions of
seven, of eight, and of addition, and as soon as we possess the
conceptions distinctly, we see that the sum must be 15." That
is, merely by knowing the *meanings* of "seven,"
and "eight," and "addition," we see that it
follows necessarily that "7 + 8 = 15" (1848, 471).



Once the Ideas and conceptions are explicated, so that we understand
their meanings, the necessary truths which follow from them are seen
as being necessarily true. Thus, once the Idea of Space is explicated,
it is seen to be necessarily true that "two straight lines
cannot enclose a space." Whewell suggested that the first law of
motion is also a necessary truth, which was knowable *a priori*
once the Idea of Cause and the associated conception of force were
explicated. This is why empirical science is needed to see necessary
truths: because, as we saw above, empirical science is needed in order
to explicate the Ideas. Thus Whewell also claimed that, in the course
of science, truths which at first required experiment to be known are
seen to be capable of being known independently of experiment. That
is, once the relevant Idea is clarified, the necessary connection
between the Idea and an empirical truth becomes apparent. Whewell
explained that "though the discovery of the First Law of Motion
was made, historically speaking, by means of experiment, we have now
attained a point of view in which we see that it might have been
certainly known to be true independently of experience" (1847,
I, 221). Science, then, consists in the "idealization of
facts," the transferring of truths from the empirical to the
ideal side of the fundamental antithesis. He described this process as
the "progressive intuition of necessary truths."



Although they follow analytically from the meanings of ideas our minds
supply, necessary truths are nevertheless informative statements about
the physical world outside us; they have empirical content.
Whewell's justification for this claim is a theological one.
Whewell noted that God created the universe in accordance with certain
"Divine Ideas." That is, all objects and events in the
world were created by God to conform to certain of his ideas. For
example, God made the world such that it corresponds to the idea of
Cause partially expressed by the axiom "every event has a
cause." Hence in the universe every event conforms to this idea,
not only by having a cause but by being such that it could not occur
without a cause. On Whewell's view, we are able to have
knowledge of the world because the Fundamental Ideas which are used to
organize our sciences resemble the ideas used by God in his creation
of the physical world. The fact that this is so is no coincidence: God
has created our minds such that they contain these same ideas. That
is, God has given us our ideas (or, rather, the "germs" of
the ideas) so that "they can and must agree with the
world" (1860a, 359). God intends that we can have knowledge of
the physical world, and this is possible only through the use of ideas
which resemble those that were used in creating the world. Hence with
our ideas--once they are properly "unfolded" and
explicated--we can colligate correctly the facts of the world and
form true theories. And when these ideas are distinct, we can know
*a priori* the axioms which express their meaning.



An interesting consequence of this interpretation of Whewell's
view of necessity is that every law of nature is a necessary truth, in
virtue of following analytically from some idea used by God in
creating the world. Whewell drew no distinction between truths which
can be idealized and those which cannot; thus, potentially, any
empirical truth can be seen to be a necessary truth, once the ideas
and conceptions are explicated sufficiently. For example, Whewell
suggests that experiential truths such as "salt is
soluble" may be necessary truths, even if we do not recognize
this necessity (i.e., even if it is not yet knowable *a
priori*) (1860b, 483). Whewell's view thus destroys the line
traditionally drawn between laws of nature and the axiomatic
propositions of the pure sciences of mathematics; mathematical truth
is granted no special status.



In this way Whewell suggested a view of scientific understanding which
is, perhaps not surprisingly, grounded in his conception of natural
theology. Since our ideas are "shadows" of the Divine
Ideas, to see a law as a necessary consequence of our ideas is to see
it as a consequence of the Divine Ideas exemplified in the world.
Understanding involves seeing a law as being not an arbitrary
"accident on the cosmic scale," but as a necessary
consequence of the ideas God used in creating the universe. Hence the
more we idealize the facts, the more difficult it will be to deny
God's existence. We will come to see more and more truths as the
intelligible result of intentional design. This view is related to the
claim Whewell had earlier made in his Bridgewater Treatise (1833),
that the more we study the laws of nature the more convinced we will
be in the existence of a Divine Law-giver. (For more on
Whewell's notion of necessity, see Fisch 1985; Snyder 1994;
Morrison 1997; Snyder 2006; Ducheyne 2009.)


## 5. The Relation Between Scientific Practice, History of Science, and Philosophy of Science



An issue of interest to philosophers of science today is the relation
between knowledge of the actual practice and history of science and
developing a philosophy of science. Whewell is interesting to examine
in relation to this issue because he claimed to be inferring his
philosophy of science from his study of the history and practice of
science. His large-scale *History of the Inductive Sciences*
(first edition published 1837) was a survey of science from ancient to
modern times. He insisted upon completing this work before writing his
*Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, founded upon their
history*. Moreover, Whewell sent proof-sheets of the
*History* to his many scientist-friends to ensure the accuracy
of his accounts. Besides knowing about the history of science, Whewell
had first-hand knowledge of scientific practice: he was actively
involved in science in several important ways. In 1825 he traveled to
Berlin and Vienna to study mineralogy and crystallography with Mohs
and other acknowledged masters of the field. He published numerous
papers in the field, as well as a monograph, and is still credited
with making important contributions to giving a mathematical
foundation to crystallography. He also made contributions to the
science of tidal research, pushing for a large-scale world-wide
project of tidal observations; he won a Royal Society gold medal for
this accomplishment. (For more on Whewell's contributions to
science, see Becher 1986; Ruse 1991; Ducheyne 2010a; Snyder 2011;
Honenberger 2018). Whewell acted as a terminological consultant for
Faraday and other scientists, who wrote to him asking for new words.
Whewell only provided terminology when he believed he was fully
knowledgeable about the science involved. In his section on the
"Language of Science" in the *Philosophy*, Whewell
makes this position clear (see 1858b, p. 293). Another interesting
aspect of his intercourse with scientists becomes clear in reading his
correspondence with them: namely, that Whewell constantly pushed
Faraday, Forbes, Lubbock and others to perform certain experiments,
make specific observations, and to try to connect their findings in
ways of interest to Whewell. In all these ways, Whewell indicated that
he had a deep understanding of the activity of science.



So how is this knowledge of science and its history important for his
work on the philosophy of science? Some commentators have claimed that
Whewell developed an *a priori* philosophy of science and then
shaped his *History* to conform to his own view (Stoll 1929;
Strong 1955). It is true that he started out, from his undergraduate
days, with the project of reforming the inductive philosophy of Bacon;
indeed this early inductivism led him to the view that learning about
scientific method must be inductive (i.e., that it requires the study
of the history of science). Yet it is clear that he believed his study
of the history of science and his own work in science were needed in
order to flesh out the details of his inductive position. Thus, as in
his epistemology, both *a priori* and empirical elements
combined in the development of his scientific methodology. Ultimately,
Whewell criticized Mill's view of induction developed in the
*System of Logic* not because Mill had not inferred it from a
study of the history of science, but rather on the grounds that Mill
had not been able to find a large number of appropriate examples
illustrating the use of his "Methods of Experimental
Inquiry." As Whewell noted, Bacon too had been unable to show
that his inductive method had been exemplified throughout the history
of science. Thus it appears that what was important to Whewell was not
whether a philosophy of science had been, in fact, inferred from a
study of the history of science, but rather, whether a philosophy of
science was *inferable from* it. That is, regardless of how a
philosopher came to invent her theory, she must be able to show it to
be exemplified in the actual scientific practice used throughout
history. Whewell believed that he was able to do this for his
discoverers' induction.


## 6. Moral Philosophy



Whewell's moral philosophy was criticized by Mill as being
"intuitionist" (see Mill 1852). Whewell's moral
philosophy *is* intuitionist in the sense of claiming that
humans possess a faculty ("conscience") which enables them
to discern directly what is morally right or wrong. Yet his view
differs from that of earlier philosophers such as Shaftesbury and
Hutcheson, who claimed that this faculty is akin to our sense organs
and thus spoke of conscience as a "moral sense."
Whewell's position is more similar to that of intuitionists such
as Cudworth and Clarke, who claimed that our moral faculty is reason.
Whewell maintained that there is no *separate* moral faculty,
but rather that conscience is just "reason exercised on moral
subjects." Because of this, Whewell referred to moral rules as
"principles of reason" and described the discovery of
these rules as an activity of reason (see 1864, 23-4). These
moral rules "are primary principles, and are established in our
minds simply by a contemplation of our moral nature and condition; or,
what expresses the same thing, by intuition" (1846, 11). Yet,
what he meant by "intuition" was not a non-rational mental
process, as Mill claimed. On Whewell's view, the contemplation
of the moral principles is conceived as a rational process. Whewell
noted that "Certain moral principles being, as we've said,
thus seen to be true by intuition, under due conditions of reflection
and thought, are unfolded into their application by further reflection
and thought"(1864, 12-13). Morality requires rules because
reason is our distinctive property, and "Reason directs us to
Rules" (1864, 45). Whewell's morality, then, does not have
one problem associated with the moral sense intuitionists. For the
moral sense intuitionist, the process of decision-making is
non-rational; just as we feel the rain on our skin by a non-rational
process, we just feel what the right action is. This is often
considered the major difficulty with the intuitionist view: if the
decision is merely a matter of intuition, it seems that there can be
no way to settle disputes over how we ought to act. However, Whewell
never suggested that decision-making in morality is a non-rational
process. On the contrary, he believed that reason leads to common
decisions about the right way to act (although our desires/affections
may get in the way): he explained "So far as men decide
conformably to Reason, they decide alike" (see 1864, 43). Thus
the decision on how we ought to act should be made by reason, and so
moral disputes can be settled rationally on Whewell's view.



Mill also criticized Whewell's claim that moral rules are
necessary truths which are self-evident. Mill took this to mean that
there can be no progress in morality--what is self-evident must
always remain so--and thus to the further conclusion that Whewell
believed the current rules of society to be necessary truths. Such a
view would tend to support the status quo, as Mill rightly complained.
(Thus he, rather unfairly. accused Whewell of justifying evil
practices such as cruelty to animals, forced marriages, and even
slavery.) But Mill was wrong to attribute such a view to Whewell.
Whewell did claim that moral rules are necessary truths, and invested
them with the epistemological status of self-evident
"axioms" (see 1864, 58). However, as noted above,
Whewell's view of necessary truth is a progressive one. This is
as much the case in morality as in science. The realm of morality,
like the realm of physical science, is structured by certain
Fundamental Ideas: in this case, Benevolence, Justice, Truth, Purity,
and Order (see 1852, xxiii). These moral ideas are conditions of our
moral experience; they enable us to perceive actions as being in
accordance with the demands of morality. Like the ideas of the
physical sciences, the ideas of morality must be explicated before the
moral rules can be derived from them (see 1860a, 388). There is a
progressive intuition of necessary truth in morality as well as in
science. Hence it does not follow that because the moral truths are
axiomatic and self-evident that we currently know them (see 1846,
38-9). Indeed, Whewell claimed that "to test self-evidence
by the casual opinion of individual men, is a
self-contradiction" (1846, 35). Nevertheless, Whewell did
believe that we can look to the dictates of positive law of the most
"morally advanced" societies as a starting point in our
explication of the moral ideas. Although he surely had a biased view
of what societies were "morally advanced," he was not
therefore suggesting that the laws of those societies are the standard
of morality. Just as we examine the phenomena of the physical world in
order to explicate our scientific conceptions, we can examine the
facts of positive law and the history of moral philosophy in order to
explicate our moral conceptions. Only when these conceptions are
explicated can we see what axioms or necessary truths of morality
truly follow from them. Mill was therefore wrong to interpret
Whewell's moral philosophy as a justification of the status quo
or as constituting a "vicious circle." Rather,
Whewell's view shares some features of Rawls's later use
of the notion of "reflective equilibrium." (For more on
Whewell's moral philosophy, and his debate with Mill over
morality, see Snyder 2006, chapter four.)