Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Rethinking Whewell.John Wettersten - 1993 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 23 (4):481-515.
    The nineteenth-century appraisal of Whewell's philosophy as confused, eclectic, and metaphysical is still dominant today. Yet he keeps reappearing on the agenda of the historians and philosophers of science. Why? Whewell continues to be a puzzle. Historians evade the puzzle by deeming him to have had no serious philosophy but some interesting ideas and/or to have been socially important. Menachim Fisch's recent study offers promise of a new appraisal. But Fisch's account leads back to the puzzle. Fisch poses the question (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • William Whewell, Cluster Theorist of Kinds.Zina B. Ward - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (2):362-386.
    A dominant strand of philosophical thought holds that natural kinds are clusters of objects with shared properties. Cluster theories of natural kinds are often taken to be a late twentieth-century development, prompted by dissatisfaction with essentialism in philosophy of biology. I will argue here, however, that a cluster theory of kinds had actually been formulated by William Whewell (1794-1866) more than a century earlier. Cluster theories of kinds can be characterized in terms of three central commitments, all of which are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • A Pragmatist Reboot of William Whewell’s Theory of Scientific Progress.Ragnar van der Merwe - 2023 - Contemporary Pragmatism 20 (3):218-245.
    William Whewell’s philosophy of science is often overlooked as a relic of 19th century Whiggism. I argue however that his view – suitably modified – can contribute to contemporary philosophy of science, particularly to debates around scientific progress. The reason Whewell’s view needs modification is that he makes the following problematic claim: as science progresses, it reveals necessarily truths and thereby grants a glimpse of the mind of God. Modifying Whewell’s view will involve reinventing his notion of necessary truth as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • It's all necessarily so: William Whewell on scientific truth.Laura J. Snyder - 1994 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 25 (5):785-807.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Discoverers' induction.Laura J. Snyder - 1997 - Philosophy of Science 64 (4):580-604.
    In this paper I demonstrate that, contrary to the standard interpretations, William Whewell's view of scientific method is neither that of the hypothetico-deductivist nor that of the retroductivist. Rather, he offers a unique inductive methodology, which he calls "discoverers' induction." After explicating this methodology, I show that Kepler's discovery of his first law of planetary motion conforms to it, as Whewell claims it does. In explaining Whewell's famous phrase about "happy guesses" in science, I suggest that Whewell intended a distinction (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • The Whewell-Mill debate on predictions, from Mill's point of view.Cornelis Menke - 2018 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 69:60-71.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Harmony and simplicity: aesthetic virtues and the rise of testability.Rhonda Martens - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (3):258-266.
    Copernicus claimed that his system was preferable in part on the grounds of its superior harmony and simplicity, but left very few hints as to what was meant by these terms. Copernicus’s pupil, Rheticus, was more forthcoming. Kepler, influenced by Rheticus, articulated further the nature of the virtues of harmony and simplicity. I argue that these terms are metaphors for the structural features of the Copernican system that make it more able to effectively exploit the available data. So it is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Quantitative realizations of philosophy of science: William Whewell and statistical methods.Kent Johnson - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (3):399-409.
    In this paper, I examine William Whewell’s (1794–1866) ‘Discoverer’s Induction’, and argue that it 21 supplies a strikingly accurate characterization of the logic behind many statistical methods, exploratory 22 data analysis (EDA) in particular. Such methods are additionally well-suited as a point of evaluation of 23 Whewell’s philosophy since the central techniques of EDA were not invented until after Whewell’s death, 24 and so couldn’t have influenced his views. The fact that the quantitative details of some very general 25 methods (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Vindicating methodological triangulation.Remco Heesen, Liam Kofi Bright & Andrew Zucker - 2019 - Synthese 196 (8):3067-3081.
    Social scientists use many different methods, and there are often substantial disagreements about which method is appropriate for a given research question. In response to this uncertainty about the relative merits of different methods, W. E. B. Du Bois advocated for and applied “methodological triangulation”. This is to use multiple methods simultaneously in the belief that, where one is uncertain about the reliability of any given method, if multiple methods yield the same answer that answer is confirmed more strongly than (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Toward a rational theory of progress.Menachem Fisch - 1994 - Synthese 99 (2):277 - 304.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Necessary and contingent truth in William Whewell's antithetical theory of knowledge.Menachem Fisch - 1984 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 16 (4):275-314.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • How and Why I Write History of Science.Menachem Fisch - 2013 - Science in Context 26 (4):573-585.
    I have always been a philosopher at heart. I write history of science and history of its philosophy primarily as a philosopher wary of his abstractions and broad conceptualizations. But that has not always been the case. Lakatos famously portrayed history of science as the testing ground for theories of scientific rationality. But he did so along the crudest Hegelian lines that did injury both to Hegel and to the history and methodology of science. Since science is ultimately rational, he (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Whewell’s tidal researches: scientific practice and philosophical methodology.Steffen Ducheyne - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (1):26-40.
    Primarily between 1833 and 1840, William Whewell attempted to accomplish what natural philosophers and scientists since at least Galileo had failed to do: to provide a systematic and broad-ranged study of the tides and to attempt to establish a general scientific theory of tidal phenomena. I document the close interaction between Whewell’s philosophy of science and his scientific practice as a tidologist. I claim that the intertwinement between Whewell’s methodology and his tidology is more fundamental than has hitherto been documented.Keywords: (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Value of Cognitive Values.Heather Douglas - 2013 - Philosophy of Science 80 (5):796-806.
    Traditionally, cognitive values have been thought of as a collective pool of considerations in science that frequently trade against each other. I argue here that a finer-grained account of the value of cognitive values can help reduce such tensions. I separate the values into groups, minimal epistemic criteria, pragmatic considerations, and genuine epistemic assurance, based in part on the distinction between values that describe theories per se and values that describe theory-evidence relationships. This allows us to clarify why these values (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   81 citations  
  • Colligation in modelling practices: From Whewell’s tides to the San Francisco Bay Model.Claudia Cristalli & Julia Sánchez-Dorado - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 85:1-15.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Inductivism in Practice: Experiment in John Herschel’s Philosophy of Science.Aaron D. Cobb - 2012 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 2 (1):21-54.
    The aim of this work is to elucidate John F. W. Herschel’s distinctive contribution to nineteenth-century British inductivism by exploring his understanding of experimental methods. Drawing on both his explicit discussion of experiment in his Preliminary Discourse on Natural Philosophy and his published account of experiments he conducted in the domain of electromagnetism, I argue that the most basic principle underlying Herschel’s epistemology of experiment is that experiment enables a particular kind of lower-level experimental understanding of phenomena. Experimental practices provide (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Convergence strategies for theory assessment.Elena Castellani - 2024 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 104 (C):78-87.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • What is wrong with the miracle argument??☆.Martin Carrier - 1991 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 22 (1):23-36.
    One of the arguments advanced in favor of scientific realism is the 'miracle argument'. It says that for the anti-realist the predictive success of science appears as an utter miracle. This argument indeed has some prima facie plausibility, provided that it is sharpened by construing "predictive success" as prediction of previously unknown laws and the occurrence of a consilience of inductions. Still, the history of science teaches us that it is possible to arrive at predictive success in this sense by (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   39 citations  
  • Aggregating Evidence in Climate Science: Consilience, Robustness and the Wisdom of Multiple Models.Martin A. Vezér - unknown
    The goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the epistemology of science by addressing a set of related questions arising from current discussions in the philosophy and science of climate change: (1) Given the imperfection of computer models, how do they provide information about large and complex target systems? (2) What is the relationship between consilient reasoning and robust evidential support in the production of scientific knowledge? (3) Does taking the mean of a set of model outputs provide epistemic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Psa 2012.-Preprint Volume- - unknown
    These preprints were automatically compiled into a PDF from the collection of papers deposited in PhilSci-Archive in conjunction with the PSA 2012.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark