This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.
John Stuart Mill was born in Putney, London, the oldest son of the Scottish philosopher and historian James Mill.
Mill separated "happiness" and "contentment", and claimed that the former was more clearly constituted by the higher modes of existence, as illustrated by his claim that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
Mill describes the five basic principles of induction which have come to be known as Mill's Methods - the method of agreement, the method of difference, the joint or double method of agreement and difference, the method of residues, and that of concomitant variations.
Mill's conception of logic was not entirely that of modern logicians; besides formal logic, what he called "the logic of consistency", he thought that there was a logic of proof, that is, a logic that would show how evidence proved or tended to prove the conclusions we draw from the evidence.
Mill's account of explanation in science was broadly that explanation seeks the causes of events where it is events in which we are interested; or seeks more general laws where we are concerned to explain less general laws as special cases of those laws.
Mill's discussion of the possibility of finding a scientific explanation of social events has worn equally well; Mill was as unwilling to suppose that the social sciences would become omniscient about human behaviour as to suppose that there was no prospect of explaining social affairs at any deeper level than that of common sense.
Feeds |
Contact