John Herschel's discussion of hypotheses in the Preliminary Discourse on Natural Philosophy has generated questions concerning his commitment to the principle that hypothetical speculation is legitimate only if warranted by inductive evidence. While Herschel explicitly articulates an inductivist philosophy of science, he also asserts that “it matters little how {a hypothesis or theory} has been originally framed” when it can withstand extensive testing and empirical scrutiny. This evidence has convinced some that Herschel endorses an early form of hypothetico-deductivism. I aim (...) to clarify this interpretive puzzle and adduce evidence in support of the inductivist interpretation of Herschel's philosophy of science by examining his published account of a series of experiments in the domain of electromagnetism. (shrink)

The unconventional correspondence between physicists Albert Einstein and Felix Ehrenhaft, especially at the height of the alleged production by the latter of magnetic monopoles, is examined in the following paper. Almost unknown by the general public, it is sometimes witty, yet it can be pathetic, and certainly bewildering. At one point the arguments they exchanged became a poetic duel between Einstein and Ehrenhaft's wife. Ignored by conventional Einstein biographies, this episode took place during the initial years of the Second World (...) War, but was rooted in disputes dating back to the early years of the twentieth century. The interesting intersection of a series of scientific controversies also highlights some aspects of the personal dramas involved, and after so many years the whole affair in itself is still intriguing. (shrink)

During the nineteenth century an intellectual elite formed in Germany which owed its status primarily to educational qualifications rather than to hereditary rights or wealth. With the ascendency of this elite, which Fritz Ringer has called the German ‘mandarins’, came their acceptance as the spiritual bearers of culture in German life. Politically they controlled the life of the Reichstag and hence were the spokesmen of the nation. As an intellectual elite they fed a diet of German idealistic philosophy to the (...) educational class. The university professors, as the most influential members of this class, spoke for the mandarin elite as a whole; and most cultivated Germans looked to the academicians for their understanding of political and cultural issues. Hence, German academic opinion became a sort of ‘mandarin ideology’. (shrink)

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 (...) knowledge of a particular phenomenon as a genuine effect produced under precise material conditions whose connections with other phenomena can be traced by variations in experimental parameters. The orienting concern of experimental inquiry seems to be the production of a secure understanding of phenomena even if it has no direct theoretical significance. Insofar as one can generate this lower-level understanding, it can function both as a fertile source for explanatory principles about phenomena and as a body of evidence against which one can test the adequacy of an explanatory hypothesis. This project provides evidence of Herschel’s inductivism not merely as a philosophical approach to understanding the sciences but as a methodological commitment in scientific practice. (shrink)