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Whewell's Consilience of Inductions–An Evaluation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Menachem Fisch
Menachem Fisch*
Affiliation:
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University
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Abstract

The paper attempts to elucidate and evaluate William Whewell's notion of a “consilience of inductions.“ In section I Whewellian consilience is defined and shown to differ considerably from what latter-day writers talk about when they use the term. In section II a primary analysis of consilience is shown to yield two types of consilient processes, one in which one of the lower-level laws undergoes a conceptual change (the case aptly discussed in Butts [1977]), and one in which the explanatory theory undergoes conceptual “stretching.” In section III both consilient cases are compared to the non-consilient case in reference to L. J. Cohen's method of relevant variables. In section IV we examine the test procedures of the theory in all three cases, and it is shown that in the event of genuine consilience (consilience of the second type) a theory acquires extraordinarily high support. In the final section something is said of the shortcomings of standard Bayesian confirmation theories that are highlighted by Whewellian consilience.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 239 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

This paper was written during a year of research at The Queen's College, Oxford. I wish to thank L. Jonathan Cohen, Prof. Mary B. Hesse, Prof. Joseph Agassi, and an anonymous referee for their helpful criticism of an earlier version of this paper.

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