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SUMMARY:'Sybil' in particulars and generals: inductive logic and Victorian
  narrative - Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow and CRASSH)
DTSTART:20071018T153000Z
DTEND:20071018T170000Z
UID:TALK8191@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Lauren Kassell
DESCRIPTION:Much of the triumphalism of early Victorian writing about phys
 ical science came from a belief that modern inductive reasoning gave much 
 stronger methodological underpinnings than those supporting earlier scienc
 e. While not claimed to be infallible\, inductive science was held to inco
 rporate methods for allowing for and dealing with fallibility\, so that er
 rors could be rectified without fundamental principles being affected. In 
 the words of the Scottish writer James Douglas\, an advocate for progressi
 ve education\, 'being rooted in nature\, inductive philosophy has the prin
 ciple of growth in it'. All the scientific disciplines\, it was widely arg
 ued\, were now founded on this logic\; indeed it was the defining quality 
 of a modern scientific discipline that it be so founded. And induction was
  also being taken up by practitioners of other kinds of knowledge\, who we
 re spreading the benefits of its secure method well beyond the sciences.\n
 \nFollowing work by Susan Faye Cannon\, recent scholarship by Jonathan Smi
 th\, Laura J. Snyder\, Mary Poovey and others has questioned the usefulnes
 s of nineteenth-century inductivism for practicising scientists. I will ar
 gue that the interesting point about the early Victorian period's tendency
  to rally round the banner of induction is less its practical effects on t
 he history of scientific discovery than its role in constructing standards
  for measuring the difference between modernity and pre-modernity\, and fo
 r disseminating a narrative pattern which seemed to represent the shape wh
 ich authoritative knowledge should take. Both these effects of the triumph
  of induction were felt extensively in culture outside scientific circles.
  My paper investigates the effects of the spreading prestige of inductive 
 reasoning from science into other areas of knowledge production\, particul
 arly those predicated on narrative. As my title suggests\, I will focus es
 pecially on the role of the inductive method in the 'social problem' or 'c
 ondition of England' novel of the 1840s and 50s.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, History and Philosophy of Science\, Department o
 f
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