The History and Geography of the Intellectual World: Whewell’s Politics of Language

Abstract Victorian metaphors, like Victorian values, are back in style. A transformation in our reading of the natural sciences, especially Darwinism, is promised. The language of the philosophers has been deconstructed. William Whewell seems a suitable case for treatment. He was a major philosopher of language, a ‘verbarian Attorney General’. Hence the attraction of taking his verbal imagery seriously. Whewell defined those who were allowed to make new scientific terms and also defined the terms they could use. Metaphor was to be shunned. Yet he advocated this plan through some of the most powerful tropes of Victorian science. Whewell’s verbal figures were notable even for his own audience. In 1841 John Herschel observed that the style of Whewell’s History and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences was marked by ‘a great assemblage and variety of metaphorical allusion, much greater indeed than we should like to see adopted by an author less capable of curbing the exuberance of a lively fancy into an entire subordination to his reason’. Readers were as impressed by Whewell’s ‘fancy’ as his ‘reason’. Herschel argued in the same review that ‘half the labour of the modern inductive philosopher’ was to make language ‘a perfect daguerrotype’ of nature. ‘Common language is a mass of metaphor, grounded not on philosophical resemblances, but on loose, fanciful and often most mistaken analogies. ‘ Unless Whewell helped make scientific language coldly mimetic he would, in Herschel’s view, lose his status as an inductive philosopher.