IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB199528779

The Age of Methods: William Whewell, Charles Peirce, and Scientific Kinds (2016)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 107
Issue: 4
Pages: 722-737
Publication date: 2016
Language: English

URI: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/689697

DOI: 10.1086/689697

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

For William Whewell and, later, Charles Peirce, the methods of science merited scientific examination themselves. Looking to history to build an inductive account of the scientific process, both men transformed scientific methods into scientific evidence. What resulted was a peculiar instance of what Ian Hacking calls “the looping effects of human kinds,” in which classifying human behavior changes that behavior. In the cases of Whewell and Peirce, the behavior in question was their own: namely, scientific study. This essay brings Hacking’s formulation to bear on the status of science in nineteenth-century intellectual history, revealing the continued entanglement of science and philosophy even as they were being prized apart. Focusing on how Whewell and Peirce turned themselves into “scientific kinds,” the essay reveals the slippage between “what” and “how” across what Peirce once called “the age of methods.”

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB199528779

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Brooke-Smith, James; (2013)
“A great empire falling to pieces”: Coleridge, Herschel, and Whewell on the Poetics of Unitary Knowledge (/p/isis/citation/CBB001253051/)

Article Sloan, Phillip R.; (2003)
Whewell's Philosophy of Discovery and the Archetype of the Vertebrate Skeleton: The Role of German Philosophy of Science in Richard Owen's Biology (/p/isis/citation/CBB000330662/)

Article Lukas M. Verburgt; (2024)
Scientific Method, Induction, and Probability: The Whewell–De Morgan Debate on Baconianism, 1830s–1850s (/p/isis/citation/CBB088934341/)

Article Ducheyne, Steffen; (2010)
Whewell's Tidal Researches: Scientific Practice and Philosophical Methodology (/p/isis/citation/CBB001021654/)

Chapter Schickore, Jutta; (2006)
A Forerunner? Perhaps, but Not to the Context Distinction. William Whewell's Germano-Cantabrigian History of the Fundamental Ideas (/p/isis/citation/CBB001033918/)

Article Wilson, Leigh; (2013)
“There the Facts Are”: Andrew Lang, Facts and Fantasy (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320818/)

Article Plutynski, Anya; (2011)
Four Problems of Abduction: A Brief History (/p/isis/citation/CBB001230106/)

Book Marietti, Susanna; (2001)
Icona e diagramma: Il segno matematico in Charles Sanders Peirce (/p/isis/citation/CBB000774832/)

Article Atkins, Richard Kenneth; (2006)
Restructuring the Sciences: Peirce's Categories and His Classifications of the Sciences (/p/isis/citation/CBB001023423/)

Thesis Anders, Paul C.; (2009)
Whewellian Science and Christian Theology: On the Possibility of Consilience (/p/isis/citation/CBB001561063/)

Book Sankey, Howard; (1999)
Causation and the Laws of Nature (/p/isis/citation/CBB000110139/)

Book David J. Murray; Stephen W. Link; (2020)
The Creation of Scientific Psychology (/p/isis/citation/CBB845455295/)

Book William J. Ashworth; (2021)
The Trinity Circle: Anxiety, Intelligence, and Knowledge Creation in Nineteenth-Century England (/p/isis/citation/CBB076113657/)

Article David Stack; (2019)
Charles Darwin and the Scientific Mind (/p/isis/citation/CBB082338915/)

Article Aleta Quinn; (2017)
Whewell on classification and consilience (/p/isis/citation/CBB436109207/)

Article Aleta Quinn; (2016)
William Whewell’s philosophy of architecture and the historicization of biology (/p/isis/citation/CBB081450661/)

Article Wilson, David B.; (2011)
William Whewell, Galileo, and Reconceptualizing the History of Science and Religion (/p/isis/citation/CBB001220423/)

Article Nie, Fuling; (2012)
The Translation of the Mechanical Terms in Zhongxue (/p/isis/citation/CBB001252845/)

Article Thorvaldsen, Steinar; Øhrstrøm, Peter; (2013)
Darwin's Perplexing Paradox: Intelligent Design in Nature (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201341/)

Article Zina B. Ward; (2023)
William Whewell, Cluster Theorist of Kinds (/p/isis/citation/CBB683562109/)