Scientific inference and the earth's interior

Dorothy Wrinch and Harold Jeffreys at Cambridge

Teru Miyake

pp. 81-91

in: Friedrich Stadler (ed), Integrated history and philosophy of science, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

That philosophical issues can, at times, have a profound influence on the development of a science, is by now a familiar idea to historically-minded philosophers of science. Studies of such influences have been limited, however, to a few sciences, with by far the most work being done on physics. I am quite confident, for example, that only a handful of philosophers are at all aware of a connection between the development of the field of seismology in the early decades of the twentieth century and the school of philosophy centered around Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at Cambridge. The main aim of this paper is to bring this connection to light through an examination of the work of Dorothy Wrinch and Harold Jeffreys, each of whom were students of this tradition of philosophy, and who went on to do important work in several different fields of science.

Cited authors

Russell Bertrand

Wrinch Dorothy

Jeffreys Harold