Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2025 August 10

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August 10

When did the term "science" begin to replace "natural philosophy"?

Obviously there was a gradual evolution from one to the other in both techniques and dominant usage of terminology. BI can't seem to find any information about the timing of the transition in terminology (or even when "science" was introduced as a term then synonymous with or competing with "natural philosophy") that's more specific than "some time in the 19th century". -- Avocado (talk) 01:46, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

March 1834 ... is when William Whewell coined the term scientist. This is not quite the question you asked, but it has a nice firm date, so perhaps you like it better.  Card Zero  (talk) 11:24, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The term natural sciences overtook natural philosophy in American English at the end of the 19th century and in British English apparently (but why?) much later, in the middle of the 20th century.

At the time, the term science had a much wider sense than just the "natural" sciences in which knowledge is acquired by "the scientific method". The term science included the social sciences as well as other academic disciplines such as history and linguistics, the latter mainly practised as philology. Even theology was considered a science.^[1][2][3] The Church of Christ, Scientist, was founded in 1879.

I think that uses of to practise science imply that science means (any of) the natural sciences. While the term scientific method takes off around 1850, practise science only becomes common in the second half of the 20th century.^[4]  ​‑‑Lambiam 11:36, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Here's science being used as a mass noun at least six times in a 1782 book by Thomas Salmon (historian). The infancy of ſcience, the advancement of ſcience, etc., and even ever ſcince the revival of ſcience in the 16th century.  Card Zero  (talk) 11:46, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It is not evident, though, that Salmon (or Tytler) consistently used the term science as a synonym for natural philosophy. Geography is called a science,^[5] as is heraldry.^[6] The terms natural philosophy or natural philosopher are used at least seven times.  ​‑‑Lambiam 19:20, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I looked at the contexts, because I wondered exactly what science meant to the author. I noticed (and was duly amused by) the science of heraldry. But in the case of geography, in the context of the "revival of science" quote, the question is asked whether there might be a vast southern continent extending from the south pole. Polar expeditions are mentioned. It seems like scientific curiosity to me. And in a discussion of ancient Egyptians and Babylonians (lumped together), they are accused of indulging in the abfurd reveries of magic and aſtrology, which always decreafe in proportion to the advancement of true ſcience, so evidently science meant something opposed to superstition.  Card Zero  (talk) 03:53, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Natural philosophy#Origin and evolution of the term includes some additional context that addresses some elements of your inquiry, but I think you're going to have a very hard time pinning down anything like a concrete answer to your over-arching question about when the one term overtook the latter. And not just because of the volume of work using the terms and the span of time we are talking about here, but also because the situation was rather a bit more complex than that of one term representing a more antiquated version of the same basic concept and giving way to the other over time. Rather, both terms co-existed for centuries and over that period both evolved to have a semantic spread of inter-related meanings with both individual flux and significant overlap between the two. And add into that complexity the fact that you are dealing not just with the common received meaning(s) of the terms in English, but also cognates and loan words in other languages which re-informed upon one-another in the increasingly metropolitan discourse of science in the 17th through 20th centuries.

Certainly I think the late Enlightenment and the Baroque era seem to have been the heyday of "natural philosopher" being the dominant semi-formal title for an empirically minded scholar with a wholly naturalistic view of the world (often in reference to a polymath), but the term, as you noted yourself, maintained currency in the common vernacular of learned discourse into the 19th century (and in more formal contexts, even the 20th) and I think wanes around the time we start see "science" more expressly associated with the more codified forms of the "scientific method" (though that phrase as an express term of art does not arrive on the scene until the late nineteenth/early 20th centuries). Incidentally, in response to Lambiam's curiosity about why "natural philosophy" lingered in common parlance a little longer in the UK, I think part of the causal narrative probably has something to do with the fact that it was well-invested in institutions of learning at that point: to this day, there are UK universities which still use it for college/department chairs and other titles.

All of which is to say, I think your inquiry imputes so many different factors that historians and formal etymologists alike could probably spend a part of a career documenting transformations and nuances and only ever arrive at a good faith answer to your question that is even more uncertain than your starting point, when all relevant epistemological and semantic factors are considered. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 22:40, 10 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]