| Phi 109 Spring 2016 |
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John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) is best known for his works on ethics, but he also wrote on large works on economics and on the general theory of knowledge; the latter is his System of Logic, first published in the 1840s. That is about a century before the article by Hempel that we will read next, it was during that century—and mainly during the last half of it—that psychology and social sciences really got established.
Mill was not the first to conceive of the idea of social sciences. A slightly older contemporary and correspondent of Mill, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), had introduced the term “sociology,” and Mill’s epigram to book VI of the System of Logic, quotes the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) writing 50 years earlier. Another 50 years before that, David Hume published his major work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739, 1740), in which he called for sciences of human nature as a counterpart to the natural sciences and compared the role of the association of ideas in these sciences to that of the attraction of bodies in natural science. (Hume influenced Mill’s thinking in many respects, among them his views on the nature of causality in general and its relation to the freedom of the will in particular.)
The selections from Mill’s book VI that we will consider are mainly introductory. Chapters 1, 3, and 6 are, respectively, a general introduction and more specific introductory discussions of psychology and the social sciences. Chapter 2 addresses the issue of the freedom of will, which Mill sees as a major hindrance to the development of sciences of human nature and society. The remaining chapters are more spcecific discussions of methodology, and our consideration of such issues will focus instead on the work of more recent writers.
I’ll suggest that you pay most attention two parts of Mill’s discussion. One is what he says about the freedom of will and the possibility of predicting human behavior and the other is his discussion in chs. 3 and 6 of the difficulties raised by complexity of human psychology and social interaction. Pay special attention to his analogy with the difference in the natural sciences between astronomy and meterology (with the study of tides lying between them).
The rest of this guide will commment on some of the references to people and ideas that appear in Mill’s discussion.
• The term “moral sciences” that appears in Mill’s title is rarely used today. It is a rough equivalent to the phrase “human sciences,” which gets some use, especially as the translation of the German term Geisteswissenschaften (literally, “sciences of mind” or “sciences of spirit”), and typically includes also what we would label “the humanities,” at least when these aim at some sort of systematic knowledge. (The term “moral,” as it is used here, is not a specific reference to morality but derives from the same source, Latin terms for character, custom, and habit.)
• Mill’s negative reference to “empiricism” (ch. 1, §1, on p. 2) might be a surprise since Mill’s own views about knowledge would usually now be given this label. He probably has in mind what he later (p. 2) speaks of as “the uncertainties of vague and popular discussion.” (The term “empiric” was still in use in Mill’s day to speak of someone who relies, especially in medicine, on experience and rules of thumb rather than scientific principles.)
• Mill refers in several places to Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who was an important figure in British law and politics and who also, in his New Organon (Novum Organum, 1620), argued for the importance of the systematic use of observation and experiment and laid a methodology for this which influenced Mill. In his New Atlantis (1627), Bacon combined both sides of interests and imagined a utopian society based on a system of institutionially organized scientific research.
• Pelagius (c. 360-420), who is mentioned at the beginning of ch. 2, was an early Christian theologian who propounded such a strong doctrine of free will that his views came to be regarded as a heresy (Pelagianism).
Mill is correct in his suggestion that disputes about free will go back still further. Indeed, his criticisms, in §3 (pp. 6-8), of a misconceived “necessitarian” view recall criticisms by early Stoics (in the 3rd cent. BCE) of what they called “the lazy argument.” As it is recalled in Cicero’s On Fate (28f), it runs like this: “If it is fated for you to recover from this illness, you will recover whether you call in a doctor or do not; similarly, if it is fated for you not to recover from this illness, you will not recover whether you call in a doctor or do not; and either your recovery or your non-recovery is fated; therefore there is no point in calling in a doctor.”
• The “Owenite” (p. 7) would have been a follower of Robert Owen (1771-1858), an early industrialist and social reformer (who, among other things, established one of the utopian settlements at New Harmony, Indiana). Owen’s followers held a view sometimes labeled “social fatalism” to which Mill, perhaps unfairly, attributes a sort of lazy argument.
• The “Dr. Whewell” mentioned in ch. 3, §1 (p. 10) is William Whewell (1794-1866), a scientist and philosopher. Although his term ‘tidology’ has not stuck, he was otherwise a very succesful inventor of terminology (e.g., ‘ion’, ‘anode’, ‘cathode’) who is sometimes given credit even for the term ‘scientist’.
• The distinction between fructifera experimenta and lucifera experimenta (ch. 6, § 1, p. 14) is from Bacon’s New Organon (bk. I, aphorism 99):
Again, even in the great plenty of mechanical experiments, there is yet a great scarcity of those which are of most use for the information of the understanding. For the mechanic, not troubling himself with the investigation of truth, confines his attention to those things which bear upon his particular work, and will not either raise his mind or stretch out his hand for anything else. But then only will there be good ground of hope for the further advance of knowledge, when there shall be received and gathered together into natural history a variety of experiments, which are of no use in themselves, but simply serve to discover causes and axioms; which I call “Experimenta lucifera,” experiments of light, to distinguish them from those which I call “fructifera,” experiments of fruit. [Spedding, trans.]