Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-03T19:43:41.729Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Whewell's Consilience of Inductions–An Evaluation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Menachem Fisch
Menachem Fisch*
Affiliation:
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The paper attempts to elucidate and evaluate William Whewell's notion of a “consilience of inductions.“ In section I Whewellian consilience is defined and shown to differ considerably from what latter-day writers talk about when they use the term. In section II a primary analysis of consilience is shown to yield two types of consilient processes, one in which one of the lower-level laws undergoes a conceptual change (the case aptly discussed in Butts [1977]), and one in which the explanatory theory undergoes conceptual “stretching.” In section III both consilient cases are compared to the non-consilient case in reference to L. J. Cohen's method of relevant variables. In section IV we examine the test procedures of the theory in all three cases, and it is shown that in the event of genuine consilience (consilience of the second type) a theory acquires extraordinarily high support. In the final section something is said of the shortcomings of standard Bayesian confirmation theories that are highlighted by Whewellian consilience.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 239 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

This paper was written during a year of research at The Queen's College, Oxford. I wish to thank L. Jonathan Cohen, Prof. Mary B. Hesse, Prof. Joseph Agassi, and an anonymous referee for their helpful criticism of an earlier version of this paper.

References

Butts, R. E. (ed.) (1968), William Whewell's Theory of Scientific Method. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Butts, R. E. (ed.) (1973), “Whewell's Logic of Induction”, in Giere and Westfall, pp. 53–85.Google Scholar
Butts, R. E. (ed.) (1977), “Consilience of Inductions and the Problem of Conceptual Change in Science”, in Colodny, pp. 71–88.Google Scholar
Cohen, L. J. (1968a), “An Argument That Confirmation Functors for Consilience Are Emprical Hypotheses”, in Lakatos, pp. 247–50. Reply to Hesse.Google Scholar
Cohen, L. J. (1968b), “A Note on Consilience”, British Journal for Philosophy of Science 19: 70–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, L. J. (1970), The Implications of Induction. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Cohen, L. J. (1977), The Probable and the Provable. Oxford: Clarendon.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, L. J., and Hesse, M. B. (1980), Applications of Inductive Logic. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Colodny, R. G. (ed.) (1977), Logic, Laws and Life—Some Philosophical Complications. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Fisch, M. (1981), “The Paradoxes of Confirmation and Their Solutions”, M. A. Thesis, Tel Aviv University.Google Scholar
Fisch, M. (1984), “Hempel's Ravens, the Natural Classification of Hypotheses and the Growth of Knowledge”, Erkenntnis 21: 45–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisch, M. (forthcoming), “Necessary and Contingent Truth in William Whewell's Antithetical Theory of Truth”, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 17.Google Scholar
Giere, R. N., and Westfall, R. S. (eds.) (1973), Foundations of Scientific Method: The Nineteenth Century. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Hesse, M. B. (1968), “Consilience of Inductions”, in Lakatos, pp. 232—46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hesse, M. B. (1971), “Whewell's Consilience of Inductions and Predictions”, The Monist 55: 520–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hesse, M. B. (1974), The Structure of Scientific Inference. London: Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hesse, M. B. (1980), “Inductive Appraisal of Scientific Theories”, in Cohen and Hesse, pp. 202–17.Google Scholar
Kneale, W. (1952), Probability and Induction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lakatos, I. (ed.) (1968), The Problem of Inductive Logic. Amsterdam: North-Holland.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laudan, L, (1971), “William Whewell on the Consilience of Inductions”, The Monist 55: 367–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Losee, J. (1983), “Whewell and Mill on the Relation between Philosophy of Science and History of Science”, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 14: 113–26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schilpp, P. A. (ed.) (1963), The Philosophy of Rudolph Carnap. The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 11. La Salle: Open Court.Google Scholar
Whewell, W. [1833] (1836), Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology. A “Bridgewater Treatise.” Cambridge.Google Scholar
Whewell, W. (1847), The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded on Their History. 2 vols. 2nd edition. London.Google Scholar
Whewell, W. (1858), Novum Organon Renovatum. London.Google Scholar
Whewell, W. (1860), On the Philosophy of Discovery. London.Google Scholar