William Whewell

William Whewell (Lancaster, 1794 - Cambridge, 1866) was a British thinker whose work spanned philosophy, the history of science, mathematics and theology. He belonged to an age when students of nature still investigated many fields at once. He is remembered as well for proposing the word 'scientist' in place of 'natural philosopher'. His thought belongs to the inductive tradition that linked Francis Bacon with Newton's physics.

He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he distinguished himself in both poetry and mathematics, and he spent most of his career there. He held posts as professor of mineralogy and of philosophy, and in 1841 became Master of his college. His best-known books are History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), which traces how each branch of science developed since antiquity, and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), in which he tries to draw a general theory of knowledge from that history.

For Whewell, science is not just the accumulation of data. The researcher must unite facts through ideas such as space, time and cause, or those specific to each discipline. He called this act of bringing facts under a conception that makes them expressible in general laws 'colligation', and illustrated it with Kepler and the elliptical orbit. These ideas are not innate, as Kant had held, but unfold with the progress of scientific thought.

In geology he opposed Lyell's uniformitarianism and accepted supernatural causes to explain gaps in the fossil record. His work on the tides was perhaps his greatest scientific achievement: he coordinated observations across many places and predicted a spot in the North Sea where the tide neither rises nor falls, a prediction confirmed in 1840. His influence can be seen in mathematics teaching at Cambridge and in much of today's scientific vocabulary. He died in 1866 after a fall from his horse.