Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Son of the utilitarian James Mill and himself a major expositor of a utilitarian theory of ethics and politics, John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was also perhaps the greatest British empiricist philosopher of the nineteenth century. His massive work A System of Logic (1843 and several subsequent editions) was intended as a textbook of the doctrine which derives all knowledge from experience, including even our knowledge of the laws of mathematics and logic. Mill conceived his work as a sustained and careful polemic against the “German, or a priori view of human knowledge” (1981, p. 233), and defended a view of the scientific enterprise as a systematic inductive process of interrogating nature, unencumbered by “innate ideas,” Kantian categories, or elaborate and speculative hypotheses. Mill understood natural science to be concerned with the following tasks: (1) the explanation and classification of phenomena, distinguished by their observable properties; (2) the production of inductive generalizations descriptive of the causal principles of observable phenomena; (3) the arrangement of these causal principles into hierarchically structured systems of higher-level and lower-level laws; (4) the reduction of die more surprising or recherché features of nature to more familiar ones; (5) the attainment of theoretical closure in areas of research where careful application of inductive ... log in or subscribe to read full text