Most contributions to Whewell scholarship have tended to stress the idealistic, antiempirical temper of Whewell’s philosophy. Thus, the only two monograph-length studies on Whewell, Blanché’s Le Rationalisme de Whewell and Marcucci’s L’ ‘Idealismo’ Scientifico di William Whewell, are, as their titles suggest, concerned primarily with Whewell’s departures from classical British empiricism. Particularly in his famous dispute with Mill, it has proved tempting to parody Whewell’s position in the debate by treating it as a straightforward encounter between an arch-empiricist and an (...) arch-rationalist. There is, however, a danger that an emphasis on the necessitarian and a priori elements in Whewell’s philosophy may well obscure the unmistakable empirical emphasis in Whewell’s theory of science. I think it is time to begin to redress the balance, by focusing attention on the significant ‘empiricist’ strains in Whewell’s philosophy of science. One of the most important of those strains is connected with the operation which Whewell calls ‘the consilience of inductions’. (shrink)

The text is the Russian translation of W. Whewell’s work “Novum Organon Renovatum” (Preface and Book I Aphorisms concerning ideas), which is the third edition of the second volume of his major work “The philosophy of the Inductive Sciences founded upon their History”. In the text, W. Whewell proposes his theory of scientific method and classification of the necessary scientific ideas as a basis, from where every particular scientific discipline derives. By adopting the structure of the notorious Francis Bacon’s “Novum (...) Organon”, Whewell reverses the order of scientific genesis, opposing himself to inductivism – the most influential philosophical theory of his time. (shrink)

In his paper “William Whewell on the Consilience of Inductions” Professor Laudan has suggested that Whewell’s use of “consilience of inductions” is not the same as mine in my paper of that title. Suppose we have a theory T which entails three empirical laws L1, L2, L3. L1 is supposed already confirmed by direct evidence of its instances, but we have as yet no direct evidence for L2 or for L3. Then Laudan distinguishes two problems: Whewell’s problem: T is suggested (...) to explain L1 and is supported by L1; how much is our confidence in T increased if it also predicts L2, and L2 is subsequently directly confirmed? My problem: T is suggested to explain L1 and is supported by L1; T also entails L3; how much is our confidence that L3 will turn out a correct prediction increased by the fact that T entails it? (shrink)

The book was planned and written as a single, sustained argument. But earlier versions of a few parts of it have appeared separately. The object of this book is both to establish the existence of the paradoxes, and also to describe a non-Pascalian concept of probability in terms of which one can analyse the structure of forensic proof without giving rise to such typical signs of theoretical misfit. Neither the complementational principle for negation nor the multiplicative principle for conjunction applies (...) to the central core of any forensic proof in the Anglo-American legal system. There are four parts included in this book. Accordingly, these parts have been written in such a way that they may be read in different orders by different kinds of reader. (shrink)