Comment by disown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by disown | Hacker News Reader

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I don't see any attribution supporting the claim that "scientist" was coined for somerville.

"1834, a hybrid coined from Latin scientia (see science) by the Rev. William Whewell, English polymath, by analogy with artist, in the same paragraph in which he coined physicist"

Edit: I'm going to pretend you're being sincere dang ( even though you rate limited me ).

No. Scientist was not coined for somerville.

First 3 minutes, professor laura snyder explains where the word scientist came from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc_-Y9rDN2g

Second, your comment about "attribution" was rather misleading ( intentional or not ).

Thirdly, the only sources so far of whewell using the word scientist in a review of her book : "An English man of science who called himself a philosopher now did so rather self-consciously..."

He's complaining about "english man" of science having to be careful about how he refers to himself because philosophers don't like people like him claiming to be philosophers. Last I checked, somerville wasn't an "english man". But regardless, the review of her book comes after he coined the term scientist.

Edit2: Nobody is questioning the attribution of scientist to whewell dang. Most everyone agrees. The question is whether whewell coined the term after somerville. I've provided sources that he didn't. And nowhere in your pg 59 is there a mention of somerville.

I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here but your comment seems very misleading for some reason.

I mean the attribution to Whewell. Turns out he coined many other words too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Whewell

Since the coinage of "scientist" was in a review of Mary Somerville's work, that claim doesn't seem far-fetched. It's true that the OP should have quoted Whewell, though, and not only secondary sources with current agendas. Surely the original text is out there somewhere?

Edit: ah here it is https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/sciencecomma/files/2015/04/whewell_... - thanks to cbkeller (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24863646).

The relevant part is on p. 59.

Edit 2: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_uWsJAAAAQAAJ/page/n67/mod... is clearer, plus you can zoom. Thanks to bitdizzy (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24863611).

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?

The source that Wikipedia uses for the anonymous writer being Whewell is 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 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.

I'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?

Err, 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.

Ah, 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.

For the curious, searching for `"whewell" "coleridge" "scientist"` does give a few results about the 1833 Coleridge exchange that user disown is referring to. (Though many of them source it to Snyder's 2011 book so they're not independent.)

Even the 1834 article we're all talking about says:

>Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge [..]

... which he presumably wrote specifically as a reference to that 1833 exchange. This article is anonymous, but see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24864582 for why it's attributed to Whewell.

So it's quite possible that he first spoke the word in the 1833 exchange with Coleridge, and first put it to paper in the 1834 review of Somerville's book.

Edit: See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24864563 which has a link to the 1833 meeting's report, which does not appear to mention Coleridge or this exchange.

As far as I can tell after reading that review captured in the archive.org link, Bergland's quote in the brainpickings.org article is inaccurate.

1. Whewell did not coin the term "scientist" (an unnamed "ingenious gentleman" did, unless Whewell slyly intends this to refer to himself, which seems unlikely since he remarks "this was not generally palatable") EDIT: It seems Whewell probably did coin the word "scientist" and this was indeed a sly self-reference.

2. "Scientist" was not coined for Somerville, but instead likely predates Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. Whewell seems to suggest the term arose during one of the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Sciences "in the last three summers" (i.e. 1-3 years before the publication of Somerville's book).

3. Whewell, at least in this article, never refers to any single person as a "scientist" and in particular does not call Somerville a scientist.

4. "Scientist" was not coined for reasons of gender, but for unifying investigators of the various subdisciplines of the natural sciences under a single name.

The only thing I can tell that is true is that Whewell speaks very highly of Somerville and is clearly an admirer of her work, especially because Somerville is a woman, and so Whewell is certainly taking Somerville's gender into account in his overall review.

This it the full text of the relevant quote (and the only time the word "scientist" shows up in the review as far as I can tell), with the direct sentence broken out.

> A curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings at York, Oxford, and Cambridge, in the last three summers. There was no general term by which these gentlemen could describe themselves with reference to their pursuits. Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden to them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer and metaphysician; savans was rather assuming, beseides being French instead of English;

> some ingenious gentlman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist -- but this was not generally palatble;

> others attempted to translate the term by which the members of similar associations in Germany have described themselves, but it was not found easy to discover an English equivalent for natur-forscher.

EDIT: Apparently @ska has found the same thing.

EDIT 2: Looks like I was wrong about Whewell not coining "scientist." @disown refers to Snyder's TED talk where she mentions that Whewell did in fact coin the word "scientist" in response to Coleridge at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Snyder's book The Philosophical Breakfast Club makes reference to this event, but I cannot find the original source. A report on the 1833 meeting (https://archive.org/details/reportofthirdmee34lond) does not contain mention of this event. Perhaps someone else can track down the original account?

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