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In my reading of that text I note two things 1) Whewell is not coining the term, but claiming it was proposed by "some ingenious gentleman" during previous (18
by ska 6y ago
In my reading of that text I note two things
1) Whewell is not coining the term, but claiming it was proposed by "some ingenious gentleman" during previous (1833 meeting?) discussion - was this perhaps sarcastic self-reference? More importantly he suggests it was discarded at the time.
2) More broadly while this comes up in the discussion of what exactly they should call what we now refer to as scientists, it is as an aside in discussion of Mary Somerville's work.
It seems then that the term was neither coined by Whewell, nor was it coined directly after Mary Somerville. Rather it was (first?) recorded in use here by Whewell, picked up again in explict discussion of Somerville as an exemplar.
If correct I guess this makes most arguments here sort-of right, unless there is an earlier written source?
- Arnavion 6y agoThe source that Wikipedia uses for the anonymous writer being Whewell is https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00033796200202722 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0003379620020272... , which says: >From Todhunter's biography [9] we learn that the reviewer was William Whewell, F.R.S. [9] in turn is: >9 I. Todhunter, "William Whewell, an account of his writings, with selections from his literary and scientific correspondence", London, 1876, vol. i., p. 92. The editor of the Quarterly Review, J. G. Loekhart, had prescribed 'a lightish paper' for the review of Mrs Somerville's book, and he commended Whewell for his 'spirited' contribution. This book is https://archive.org/details/williamwhewelld01whewgoog https://archive.org/details/williamwhewelld01whewgoog but archive.org's search doesn't find any mention of "scientist" in it, and it's 900 pages long so I have no idea if it's in there. "artist", and "philosopher" and "Coleridge" have 35 search results between them, but none of them appear to be relevant.
- ska 6y agoI'm confused as to what you are responding to. The reference we are talking about is above, and it is Whewell's review of Somerville's book (i.e. it is a scan of the text of the 1834 quarterly review you mention). So that attribution isn't in question. It does contain "scientist" (the text is searchable directly) but refers to someone else as having coined the term. Unless I've misread something?
- Arnavion 6y agoErr, my bad. I initially quoted a lot more and then trimmed it down, but deleted the wrong part. Let me try again: >From Todhunter's biography [9] we learn that the reviewer was William Whewell, F.R.S. Whewell wrote: > >[...] > >/Philosophers/ was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer and metaphysician; /sarans/ was rather assuming, besides being French instead of English; some ingenious gentleman [Whewell himself] proposed that, by analogy with /artist/, they might form /scientist/ [...] The "[Whewell himself]" is an interjection by Sydney Ross. As I said that entire section is cited to the Todhunter biography, so I assumed Ross had found something in the the biography that would verify that Whewell was referring to himself, but I couldn't find it myself.
- ska 6y agoAh, gotcha. Above I wondered if it might be a self reference also but couldn't see from the text. Either way I think the rest stands.