ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The Role of Social Science in Joseph Priestley’s Thought
Author: Matsumoto Akihito
In the Victorian period, controversies between T. H. Huxley and J. C. Maxwell about scientific methodology promoted a disjunction between science and religion. However, the controversies provided scientists with pure science. In parallel with these controversies, economists tried to reconstruct economics as a pure science, introducing natural science’s methodology. As a result, economics came to be regarded as one of the sciences. In eighteenth-century England, however, science was integrated with religion and economics, at that time the field was called political economy although it was referred to as a science connected to religion. This paper focuses on Joseph Priestley, who was one of the most famous scientists in late eighteenth-century England, during the beginning of Great Britain’s Industrial Revolution. The activities of Protestant dissenters, including the Unitarians, made a major contribution to the Industrial Revolution. Priestley, a leading Unitarian, contributed abundant scientific knowledge to the industrial world. He also considered the consequences of the wealth created by the Industrial Revolution. Priestley was a chemist and was renowned for his discovery of oxygen. However, his achievements extended to branches of social science. This paper elucidates how Priestley applied the methodology of natural philosophy to social science. Priestley used the term science synonymously with theory. He regarded scientific progress as the discovery of facts. He believed improvements in science would promote many arts, and the arts would improve society and humanity. His scientific ideas presupposed his theology, and he regarded progress to be a limitless cycle that was directed by God’s Divine Providence. While the French disconnected science from religion, harmony between the two played a significant role in the English Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century. This harmony between science and religion was the basis of Priestley’s methodology. Priestley did not build upon a hypothesis in his process of reasoning. For him, only observation and experience were safe methods to discover new facts. These basic ideas were applied not only to natural science but also to social science, especially political economy. Thus, he examined political economy from historical facts, and his discoveries contributed to the well-being of society.
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