A FORERUNNER?—PERHAPS, BUT NOT TO THE CONTEXT DISTINCTION. WILLIAM WHEWELL’S GERMANO-CANTABRIGIAN HISTORY OF THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS

Abstract

William Whewell’s philosophical work has often been considered as a “forerunner” to the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, and sometimes Whewell is presented as an “early advocate” of that distinction (Losee 1979; Laudan 1980; Hoyningen-Huene 1987; Schaffer 1994; Yeo 1993). In contrast to other nineteenth-century “forerunners”, notably Duhem and the anti-psychologists (see Schäfer and Peckhaus, this volume), Whewell does not owe this dubious honor to the advocates of early twentieth-century Logical Empiricism. Rather, he was made a forerunner by those philosophers who have been concerned with hypothetico-deductivist approaches to science. Larry Laudan, for example, has claimed Whewell for his study of the emergence of epistemological fallibilism. According to Laudan, the link between the logic of discovery and the justification of theories was abandoned in the early nineteenth century, and it was then, that criteria for justification were found to be independent of the generation of theories. Whewell appears as one of the central figures in this development, because he held that “(1) theories can be appraised (“verified”) independently of the circumstances of their generation, and (2) such modes of appraisal, even if fallible, are more germane to the process of justification than any fallible rules of discovery would be” (Laudan 1980, p. 181).