Menachem Fisch

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 short-comings of standard Bayesian confirmation theories that are highlighted by Whewellian consilience

0. Rational Rabbis aspires to make two main points, one philosophical and contemporary, the other interpretative and historical. The book’s philosophical undertaking, presented in Part I, is to develop a central insight of Karl Popper’s into a more fuller theory of rational endeavor. The book’s interpretative and main undertaking, presented in Part II, is to argue (a) that the talmudic literature bears clear witness to a tannaitic view of humanly possible intellectual achievement intriguingly akin to the theory of rationality proposed in Part I, and (b) that despite appearances to the contrary, it is a voice centrally responsible for the Bavli’s halakhic discourse and project. The TR session at AAR 2002 focused on this second last claim by means of a close reading of the ‘meitivi’ sugya presented in Bavli, Berakhot 19b-20a. A detailed reading of the sugya can now be accessed at: http://jtr.lib.virginia.edu/volume4/number2/TR04_02_a01.html What follows briefly summarizes that reading and outlines its broader philosophical and hermeneutical settings.

Some relativists deny that moral discourse is factual. According to them, our ethical commitments are to be explained by appealing to noncognitive mental states like desires, rather than to beliefs in some independent moral facts. Indeed, the package antirealism (there are no moral properties) & noncognitivism (the source of moral commitments is noncognitive) seems to be implicit in Lewis’s and Harman’s relativism. But to many philosophers this package seems to be unattractive. Our task in this paper is to construe and defend a less committal and hence more attractive version of relativism. Our thesis has two elements. First, we shall present a version of relativism that combines, on the one hand, realism with regard to thick ethical properties, and, on the other, antirealism with regard to thin ethical properties. Secondly, we shall argue that this version of relativism can be defended through the skeptical theory of meaning Kripke attributes to the later Wittgenstein. The paper comprises three parts: the first sketches in very broad lines a version of standard moral relativism. In the second part we construe an alternative version that we call ‘cultural relativism.’ By appealing to the thick-thin distinction, cultural relativists explain what it means to say of forms of life that they are in conflict. In the third part we shall elaborate an argument whose conclusion is that in ranking conflicting ethical outlooks, people make an error, that is, they attribute to these outlooks moral properties that do not exist.

More than any other aspect of the Second Scientific Revolution, the remarkable revitalization or British mathematics and mathematical physics during the first half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most deserving of the name. While the newly constituted sciences of biology and geology were undergoing their first revolution, as it were, the reform of British mathematics was truly and self-consciously the story of a second coming of age. ‘Discovered by Fermat, cocinnated and rendered analytical by Newton, and enriched by Leibniz with a powerful and comprehensive notation’, wrote the young John Herschel and Charles Babbage of the calculus in 1813, ‘as if the soil of this country [was] unfavourable to its cultivation, it soon drooped and almost faded into neglect; and we now have to re-import the exotic, with nearly a century of foreign improvement, and to render it once more indigenous among us’.

I have always been a philosopher at heart. I write history of science and history of its philosophy primarily as a philosopher wary of his abstractions and broad conceptualizations. But that has not always been the case. Lakatos famously portrayed history of science as the testing ground for theories of scientific rationality. But he did so along the crudest Hegelian lines that did injury both to Hegel and to the history and methodology of science. Since science is ultimately rational, he argued, rival methodologies can prove their mettle by competing for whose tendentiously reconstructed account of the history of science renders more of it rational! My own approach to the relationship between history and philosophy of science started out perhaps a little more open-mindedly than Lakatos’s, but in a manner no less crude. Over the years the relationship between the history I wrote and the philosophy to which I was committed took on a firmer and more reciprocal shape. It did so in the course of a process that I now realize exemplified the philosophical position it eventually yielded. I would like to trace that development in the following pages and reflect as best I can on where it has lead and left me.

William Whewell was a giant of Victorian intellectual culture. His influence, whether recognized or forgotten, is palpable in areas as diverse as moral philosophy, mineralogy, architecture, the politics of education, physics, engineering, and theology. Recent studies of the place of the sciences in nineteenth-century Britain have repeatedly indicated the significance of Whewell's sweeping and critical proposals for a reformed account of scientific knowledge and moral values. However, until now there has been no detailed study of the context and impact of his project. This collection of essays by recognized authorities in the fields of history, history of science, and philosophy thus represents the first attempt to do justice to a magisterial nineteenth-century intellectual. More generally, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of Victorian intellectual life and its aftermath.