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William Whewell, 1794-1866.
Cambridge polymath - mathematician, scientist, moral philosopher, theologian, educator and economist. As one contemporary put it, "science is his forte, omniscience is his foible".
William Whewell was born in Lancaster, the son of a carpenter. Young William's outstanding performance in his early schooling caught the attention of schoolmasters, and led his father to reluctantly consent to his further education, rather than apprenticing him off. After a period at grammar schools in Lancaster, topped off at Haversham school, William Whewell entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1812, where he would end up spending the rest of his life. Whewell made second wrangler and obtained his B.A. in 1816. After a period as a private tutor,. Whewell was elected fellow of Trinity College in 1817 and assistant tutor in mathematics.
In his youth, Whewell drank deeply from continental sources - particularly the German philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the French mathematical science of Lagrange and Laplace. Cambridge, then still lumbering on with its Scholastic curriculum and bizarre Tripos, had fallen well behind. Early in his time at Cambridge, Whewell had met and befriended the astronomer John F.W. Herschel, Charles Babbage, George Peacock and the economist Richard Jones and several other bright lights. Whewell & Co. founded the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1819, with the goal of bringing modern continental science to Britain Whewell's first textbook, Elementary Treatise on Mechanics (1819) imported the French analytical tradition, applying the new mathematics to other sciences. Whewell was elected to the Royal Society in 1820, and became a lecturer in mathematics at Trinity.
In 1825, William Whewell was ordained an Anglican priest. That same year, the Cambridge chair in mineralogy fell vacant, and Whewell made his mind to compete for it. He spent the next few years on long vacations in Germany studying the subject (as well as Gothic churches and Romantic literature, for which he maintained a lifelong devotion), and finally secured the position of professor of mineralogy at Cambridge in 1828. Whewell promptly put out a small tract on mineralogy, but his next few years would be marked by an veritable explosion in productivity in other topics.
For economists, the most memorable was undoubtedly Whewell's "Mathematical Exposition", a series of essays read before the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1829, 1830) translating most of the extant Ricardian economic theory into mathematics. The endeavor was not warmly welcomed by many contemporaries, and Whewell exercise was partly polemical - to prove that Ricardo's theory was mistaken, that even accepting his premises, one reached the opposite conclusions. Whewell showed the usefulness of mathematical methods, and expressed his confidence that mathematics could be applied as successfully to economics as to the physical mechanics. But he also wanted to emphasize the problem of the premises. Mechanics was successful because it was careful with its premises, which it only established after much careful observation and experimentation. Economists, by contrast, seem happy to pluck their assumptions from a priori reflection, speculation and slapdash simplification. As a result, their premises were incomplete and inadequate, and so long as economists approached them that way, economics would remain far behind mechanics, no matter how much mathematics was thrown at it. This latter observation had been impressed upon Whewell by Richard Jones. Friends from their Cambridge days, Whewell and Jones had maintained a close intellectual relationship through the 1820s. Jones, a thorough British empiricist to the bone, was always a little suspicious and occasionally impatient with Whewell's analytical proclivities. Jones had always tried to curb Whewell's wide-eyed belief that the moral sciences, law even theology, could be reduced to a grand over-arching natural philosophy with the precision of mechanics. Jones impressed upon Whewell the importance of empirical facts in the construction of theory, and nudged Whewell in that direction. In 1831, Jones wrote a blistering critique of the Ricardians, and added an barely-concealed condemnation of the logical-deductivist methodology espoused by the Catallacticists of Oxford. In his (anonymous) review of Jones for the British Critic, Whewell joined in the fray.
The collaboration with Jones on economics was vital in transitioning Whewell's perspective from analytical youth to mature empiricist Whewell and Jones formed the kernel of what can be called the "English Historical School". The Cambridge empiricist crew (Whewell, Jones, Babbage and, one might add the elderly Malthus) positioned themselves against both the abstractness of the Ricardians of London and the logical-deductivist Catallacticists of Oxford. The collection of facts must precede the construction of theory, and to that end promoted the advance of data-collection and statistics. Nonetheless, Whewell's attempts to fit mathematical demand curves to data and his derivation of an equilibrium in trade in a 1850 article have led some to consider him a proto-Marginalist.
Whewell was one of the founders of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in 1831 Whewell invited the pioneering Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet to the BAAS meetings in Cambridge in 1832. The Cambridge empiricist crew, led by Whewell, promptly persuaded the BAAS to add "Section F" ("Statistics", soon to include "Economic Science") in 1833, the first open professional organization of economists in Britain. The same crew led the effort the next year to found the Statistical Society of London in 1834.
In 1833, Whewell contributed a notable essay on astronomy as part of the Bridgewater Treatises on natural theology. Loosely, Whewell's basic argument was that knowledge of the world is acquired because there are "fundamental" and uniform laws of science which we are able to discover. Whewell took this as evidence of the existence of a divinity to provide such uniformity. These underlying scientific laws of the world are precisely the "Ideas" that God used in his creation of it. Taking it a step further, Whewell went on to argue that science, by "discovering" these laws, was itself a providential task as it brought men closer to understanding the majesty of God's design.
Whewell articulated his empiricist view of science more generally in his two monumental treatises, History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) Whewell is often regarded as the father of modern philosophy of science.
Whewell is best known for his theory of induction (which led up to a sharp debate with the more empirically-minded John Stuart Mill). The "sharing" of human mind and physical phenomena was used by Whewell to argue that a priori ideas were necessarily "true" in an empirical sense. Because mind and world are synchronized by the same principle, human intuition and empirical evidence tend to achieve the same results. To use a famous example, Whewell did not accept that 2 + 1 = 3 on the grounds that it was a tautology (i.e. "2 + 1 is the definition of 3", as argued by Condillac and James Mill) nor because it was an empirical fact ("experience shows that a triple of things can be divided into a double and a single", as argued by John Stuart Mill). Instead, Whewell argued that because it is inconceivable to think that 2 + 1 is not equal to 3, therefore 2 + 1 = 3. Empirical evidence merely confirms this natural intuition, but it is not the cause of it.
Whewell was also an able pedagogue with an important role in reorganizing Trinity College, Cambridge. Whewell was critical in introducing the "moral sciences" and "natural sciences" examinations at Cambridge in 1848. He was also notable wordsmith, e.g. the positive/negative charge language for electro-chemistry used since Faraday and even the terms "scientist" and "physicist" in their modern meaning are originally due to Whewell.
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