WILLIAM WHEWELL AND THE NATURE OF GEOLOGICAL INQUIRY

William Whewell (1794-1866) was an intellectually prominent academic and polymath of the early 19th century. His philosophical approach to what he termed “the inductive sciences,” among which he included geology, was subsequently eclipsed by the philosophical influence of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), with whom Whewell engaged in a very prominent debate over the nature of what was then considered to be inductive reasoning. In the 150 years since the Mill-Whewell debate, the philosophy of Mill and its many related successors, including logical empiricism and Popperian falsificationism, have been shown by modern philosophers to embody distinctive flaws when taken as strategies for productive scientific inquiry. In contrast, there has been a resurgence of attention to the views of Whewell, which were based on the actual history of scientific practice, in contrast to the idealized, proscriptive logic of Mill and his successors. Unfortunately, these developments are not well known among practicing scientists in general, nor to geologists in particular, in that many still adhere to philosophical presumptions (often unstated) that have been discredited by modern philosophers of science. The insights of Whewell, who had the amazing background (for a philosopher) of a Professorship of Mineralogy at Cambridge and the Presidency of the Geological Society (of London), have particular relevance to the Earth sciences, and these insights are probably best appreciated in their historical context, including their application to the catastrophism/uniformitarianism debates of the early 19th century.