By Katharine Anderson
Victorian Britain, with its maritime economic climate and robust hyperlinks among govt and clinical companies, based an place of work to gather meteorological facts in 1854 so that it will foster a latest technological know-how of the elements. yet because the workplace grew to become to prediction instead of information assortment, the delicate technology grew to become a public spectacle, with its forecasts open to day-by-day scrutiny within the newspapers. And meteorology got here to imagine a pivotal function in debates in regards to the accountability of scientists and the authority of science.Studying meteorology as a way to envision the ancient identification of prediction, Katharine Anderson bargains right here an engrossing account of forecasting that analyzes medical perform and concepts approximately proof, the association of technology in public existence, and the articulation of clinical values in Victorian tradition. In Predicting the elements, Anderson grapples with primary questions on the functionality, intelligibility, and bounds of clinical paintings whereas exposing the general public expectancies that formed the perform of technology in this period.A cogent research of the notable background of climate forecasting in Victorian Britain, Predicting the elements should be crucial interpreting for students drawn to the general public dimensions of technology. (20051103)
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54 One of his most successful works was The Prophets of Israel, originally presented as lectures to audiences in Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1881–82; yet an earlier essay, written in 1876 as he faced proceedings for heresy, most explicitly revealed the contrast Smith marked between science and religion. In the tradition of historical scholarship, Smith was concerned with establishing prophecy in the context of the ancient world. Prophecy is, he began, “a fact of history”; the prophets were “the children of their country and their age”; and the consciously “supernatural” aspects of prophecy can be understood in terms of the beliefs and demands of an earlier state of society.
As one collection of prophecies noted, “much of the interest of the Predictions . . , made the same point when he brought Airy’s discussion of Caesar into an essay on natural law and miracles. ” 42 Victorian debates about “testimony” and prediction were concerned with the order of nature. Could that order be interrupted by supernatural events or miracles, or did events unfold always under the infallible pressure of natural law? Prophecy raised the same questions as miracles about the weight of natural law: indeed, prophecies were conventionally considered as a specially conclusive form of miracles, grounded in “the uncontested verdict of history” that did not, for instance, raise the problem of credulous observers.
In a private reply to Ward, Mill agreed that God’s absence could not be proven, while disagreeing that this negative evidence required us to believe. Yet—the important point for us here—Mill also accepted Ward’s characterization of prediction as the key. ” 53 That nature is something about which we can make accurate predictions, to the degree we can understand its complexity, was for Mill the fundamental point to uphold, just as for Ward it was the fundamental point to resist. Smith treated prophecy differently,while sharingWard and Mill’s sense that it was a distinguishing element of both science and liberal theology.