18 - The place of economics in the hierarchy of the sciences: Section F from Whewell to Edgeworth

Summary

[Adam Smith] severed economic science from politics; he dealt with it as concerned with physical objects and natural laws. To his English predecessors it had been a department of politics or morals; while many of his English successors recognised that in his hands it had become more analogous to physics, and delighted to treat it by the methods of mechanical science.

Cunningham (1910, 2:594)

Introduction

At its 1833 meeting, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was taken over by

Cambridge and metropolitan savants, who preferred an ideology of science derived more from Newton than from Bacon. Naive inductivism was replaced by an ideology of method which gave more emphasis to theory, to deduction, and to mathematics. … The effects of these moves, due chiefly to [William] Whewell, were to legitimate the vested career and intellectual interests of certain Cambridge and London savants. … A hierarchy of sciences was proclaimed, with Newtonian astronomy at its head. Deductive and mathematical reasoning was given new importance. The Association's edicts on proper science came increasingly from Trinity College, Cambridge. (Morrell andThackray 1981, 267)

The concept of a hierarchy of sciences stemmed from William Whewell's understanding of the developmental processes of science. “The central, and clearly the most intriguing, thesis of Whewell's philosophy of science is that science develops by becoming a more and more comprehensive system of laws that are both universal and necessary, and that are, nevertheless, in some sense the result of induction” (Butts 1989, 4).