William Whewell’s Semantic Account of Induction

Abstract

William Whewell's account of induction differs dramatically from the one familiar from twentieth-century debates. I argue that Whewell's induction can be usefully understood by comparing the difference between his views and more standard accounts to contemporary debates between semantic and syntactic views of theories: rather than understanding inductive inference as capturing a relationship between sentences or propositions, Whewell understands it as a method for constructing a model of the world. The difference between this ("semantic") view and the more familiar ("syntactic") picture of induction is reflected in other aspects of Whewell's philosophy of science, particularly his treatment of consilience and the order of discovery. What is meant by success in these cases? To this we reply, that our inquiry must be, whether the facts have the same relation in the hypothesis which they have in reality. (William Whewell 1840/2014b, 210

ACONSILIENCE OF EQUAL REGARD: STEPHEN JAY GOULD ON THE RELATION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

“…Whewell envisaged an imaginative act of leaping beyond what the observations disclosed, and using this resulting interpretative framework to coordinate those observations. The degree of coordination—or “colligation”—that this framework afforded could be seen as an indication of its reliability (Cowles 2016; Dethier 2018).…”