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Misunderstanding John Stuart Mill on science: Paul Feyerabend’s bad influence
... The arguments above refer mainly to empirical assessment, but the usefulness of PoP go well beyond it. In fact, the original arguments given by J. S. Mill in support of PoP were not directly focused on empirical tests (so much that some authors have denied that he was referring to science at all [13]). They are as follows: 1) a rejected theory may still be true (we are not infallible); 2) even when false, it may contain a portion of truth, and only the collision of different views allows the emergence of such truth; 3) a theory that is fully true but not contested will be held as a matter of prejudice or dogma, without a full comprehension of its rational basis; 4) the full meaning of a theory even if true, can only be comprehended by contrast with other views. ...
... its mathematical 12 Personally, we would include in this category most current approaches to quantum gravity. 13 Here we would include all the quantum gravity approaches which do not fit in the previous category. ...
We reflect on the nature, role and limits of non-empirical theory assessment in fundamental physics, focusing in particular on quantum gravity. We argue for the usefulness and, to some extent, necessity of non-empirical theory assessment, but also examine critically its dangers. We conclude that the principle of proliferation of theories is not only at the very root of theory assessment but all the more necessary when experimental tests are scarce, and also that, in the same situation, it represents the only medicine against the degeneration of scientific research programmes.
... 238-241). For a critical discussion of Feyerabend's engagement with Mill see Staley (1999) and Jacobs (2003). ...
We analyse insufficient epistemic pluralism and associated problems in science-based policy advice during the COVID-19 pandemic drawing on specific arguments in Paul Feyerabend’s philosophy. Our goal is twofold: to deepen our understanding of the epistemic shortcomings in science-based policy during the pandemic, and to assess the merits and problems of Feyerabend’s arguments for epistemic pluralism as well as their relevance for policy-making. We discuss opportunities and challenges of integrating a plurality of viewpoints from within and outside science into policy advice thus contributing to discussions about normative issues concerning evidence and expertise in policy-making.
... 35 In his 1981a, Feyerabend equates his justification of proliferation with Mill's (cf. Lloyd, 1997 andJacobs (2003) for a criticism of Feyerabend's reading of Mill). 36 I take the lack of explicit constraints on proliferation, the aforementioned vagueness, and the use of 'etc.'s in his lists to indicate that Feyerabend sees proliferation as unrestricted. ...
The near consensus in the secondary literature on Feyerabend is that his epistemological anarchism, characterized by the slogan ‘anything goes’, was not a positive proposal but the conclusion of a reductio argument against his opponents (Lloyd 1997; Staley 1999; Munévar 2000; Farrell 2003; Tsou 2003; Oberheim 2006; Roe 2009). This makes anarchism a mere criticism rather than a substantive position in its own right. In this paper, I argue that Feyerabend held anarchism as a positive thesis. Specifically, I present two possible interpretations of anarchism: one where anarchism is entailed by Feyerabend's radical view of pluralism and another where scientists must be ‘methodological opportunists’, which Feyerabend held simultaneously from at least 1970. I then consider how these positions fare against the more influential criticisms of anarchism (Nagel 1977; Worrall 1978; Godfrey-Smith 2003). I conclude by suggesting two avenues to constraining a literal interpretation of ‘anything goes’ on Feyerabendian grounds.
... These ethical views, however, look very different in the light of the consideration, usually ignored, that Mill regarded politics as applied social science. The argument over whether Mill intended to apply the arguments in On Liberty to science is summarized in Jacobs, who denies that he did (Jacobs 2003). 11. ...
This collection of new essays interprets and critically evaluates the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. It offers innovative historical scholarship on Feyerabend's take on topics such as realism, empiricism, mimesis, voluntarism, pluralism, materialism, and the mind-body problem, as well as certain debates in the philosophy of physics. It also considers the ways in which Feyerabend's thought can contribute to contemporary debates in science and public policy, including questions about the nature of scientific methodology, the role of science in society, citizen science, scientism, and the role of expertise in public policy. The volume will provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the topics which Feyerabend engaged with throughout his career, showing both the breadth and the depth of his thought.
For an idea so central to the thought of a figure so prominent in the history of political philosophy, John Stuart Mill's ‘tyranny of the majority’ has been badly neglected. In this paper examination of strategic texts leads to the conclusions that Mill developed different conceptions of majority tyranny focussed on the middle class and the labouring class respectively, and that with regard to such tyranny he contrasted the situations of different societies. The United States had succumbed to it, he believed, while England might yet be spared it.
This paper is designed to reinterpret and clarify John Stuart Mill's ideas on science. Past discussions of these ideas strike me as unsatisfactory in two crucial respects. In the first place they have encouraged us to regard Mill's principal work on epistemology, A System of Logic , as fundamentally inductivist This is the received interpretation of Mill's Logic and one finds it summarized and affirmed in the remark of Laurens Laudan that 'by and large' Mill was 'a rather orthodox inductivist who saw science as the generalisation of observation and who argued that all scientific ideas (including those of mathematics) come directly from experience.
INTRODUCTION This chapter focuses on Democracy in America, certainly the most famous - and probably the most important - of the works of Alexis de Tocqueville. It is an effort on my part to re-examine and to rethink the making of Tocqueville's classic book, based upon my work over the past five years as translator of the forthcoming English language version of Eduardo Nolla's critical edition of the Democracy. In 1990, this invaluable contribution to Tocqueville studies was published first in a Spanish translation and then in the original French. The Nolla work was the first, and remains by far the fullest, critical edition of Tocqueville's Democracy. It presents a very broad and extensive selection of early outlines, drafts, manuscript variants, marginalia, unpublished fragments, and other materials relating to the writing of Tocqueville's book. These working papers are largely drawn from the Yale Tocqueville Manuscripts Collection, which is housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University and contains, among other treasures, Tocqueville's original working manuscript for the Democracy and large quantities of his drafts. Included in the apparatus of the Nolla critical edition are editorial notes, a selection of important appendices, excerpts from and/or cross-references to Tocqueville's travel notebooks, his correspondence, and his printed sources, as well as significant excerpts from the critical commentary of family and friends, written in response to their readings of Tocqueville's manuscript.
Introduction A remarkable aspect of John Stuart Mill's argument in On Liberty (1859) is his claim to be defending “one very simple principle”: that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant” (OL i.9; Mill 1977: 223, emphasis added). Prevention of harm to others is a necessary condition for the legitimate exercise of any form of coercion against “human beings in the maturity of their faculties”. The implication usually seized upon by commentators, which, however, is not the only possible one, is that any adult ought to be free to do anything that does not harm other people. In other words, a civil society has no legitimate authority to regulate any conduct that does not pose a definite risk of harm to others, and should not even consider regulating it. Mill seems to confirm this interpretive strategy later in the same paragraph: “The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign” (ibid., emphasis added).
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• Among the philosophical writers of the present century in these islands, no one occupies a higher position than Sir William Hamilton. He alone, of our metaphysicians of this and the preceding generation, has acquired, merely as such, an European celebrity: while, in our own country, he has not only had power to produce a revival of interest in a study which had ceased to be popular, but has made himself, in some sense, the founder of a school of thought. The school, indeed, is not essentially new; for its fundamental doctrines are those of the philosophy which has everywhere been in the ascendant since the setting in of the reaction against Locke and Hume, which dates from Reid among ourselves and from Kant for the rest of Europe. But that general scheme of philosophy is split into many divisions, and the Hamiltonian form of it is distinguished by as marked peculiarities as belong to any other of its acknowledged varieties. My subject, therefore, is less Sir W . Hamilton, than the questions which Sir W . Hamilton discussed. It is, however, impossible to write on those questions in our own country and in our own time, without incessant reference, express or tacit, to his treatment of them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
• Among the philosophical writers of the present century in these islands, no one occupies a higher position than Sir William Hamilton. He alone, of our metaphysicians of this and the preceding generation, has acquired, merely as such, an European celebrity: while, in our own country, he has not only had power to produce a revival of interest in a study which had ceased to be popular, but has made himself, in some sense, the founder of a school of thought. The school, indeed, is not essentially new; for its fundamental doctrines are those of the philosophy which has everywhere been in the ascendant since the setting in of the reaction against Locke and Hume, which dates from Reid among ourselves and from Kant for the rest of Europe. But that general scheme of philosophy is split into many divisions, and the Hamiltonian form of it is distinguished by as marked peculiarities as belong to any other of its acknowledged varieties. My subject, therefore, is less Sir W . Hamilton, than the questions which Sir W . Hamilton discussed. It is, however, impossible to write on those questions in our own country and in our own time, without incessant reference, express or tacit, to his treatment of them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
John Stuart Mill on Induction and Hypotheses STRUANJACOBS SINCE ITS APPEARANCE in 1843, John Stuart Mill's great work of epistemology and metascience, A System of Logic, has been closely studied as a philosophical text, but its composition and the revisions Mill made to its several editions have been largely overlooked. Historians of ideas have been derelict in detail- ing changes in Mill's conception of scientific methods. The following study is a contribution to redressing that neglect. According to received opinion, Mill's theory of science is fundamentally inductivist, envisaging basic laws of science as produced and proven by inductive methods? It will here be contended that this was not his mature, settled view. He came to believe that most scientific laws actually originate as hypotheses, and on account of this he had to narrow his conception of induction and the purpose of inductive methods. An interest- ing, but hitherto inevitably obscured, effect of Mill's espousal of the hypotheti- For helpful comments on earlier versions of this text the author is grateful to Mr. Derek Crabtree, Dr. Bruce Langtry, Dr. Robert Orr, Dr. Simon Schaffer, Professor C. L. Ten, and two anonymous readers for this journal. ' As anyone with at least a nodding acquaintance with A System of Logic knows, Mill attributed a hypothetical method to science, besides an inductive method. His hypothetical method is usually seen as an unhappy appendage to the inductive. (Mill also recognized a deductive method, but being parasitic on the inductive, it highlights for readers the depth of his allegiance to in- ductivism.) What is not appreciated is that only after strategic metascientific parts of the Logic had been written did Mill become a proponent of the hypothetical method, which he then reaffirmed through successive editions. For earlier thoughts of mine on this subject, see Struan Jacobs, "From Logic to Liberty," The Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (December 1986): 751-63. Some of the many studies which read Mill's metascience synchronically and fail to note his later adoption of the hypothetical method are: Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954), 256; William Thomas, Mill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 52ff.; Edward H. Madden, "John Stuart Mill's System of Logic," in Theories of Scientific Method, ed. R. M. Blake, C. J. Ducasse, and E. H. Madden (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 218ff.; Alan Ryan,John Stuart Mill (New York: Pantheon Books, x 97o), xi; R. P. Anschutz, The Philosophy of J. S. Mill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 97 ft. [69] 70 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:1 JANUARY 1991 cal method -- to be described later in the paper -- is that his methodology and that of William Whewell, though commonly interpreted as disjoint, actually share important ground. I . Before examining Mill's account of the methods of science we should briefly describe the aim he sees them serving. He rejects, in the first place, the ideal of certainty that Whewell and other intuitionists affirmed. There are, Whewell said, instructive (synthetic) necessary truths for scientists to discover, proposi- tions that can be known with complete certainty. Whewell argued that these propositions must be true because counterinstances are inconceivable. Mill's response is to treat inconceivability as indicative of, not necessity, but our having never experienced the subjects of the negations? Convictions about necessity arise from repeatedly associated experiences. Mill knew of the Humean objection against inductive reasoning-- consistently with Victorian philosophy's tendency to disregard him, ~ Hume is seldom referred to in the Logic -- and made use of this clear statement of Whewell: " 'Experience must always consist of a limited number of observa- tions; and, however numerous these may be, they can show nothing with regard to the infinite number of cases in which the experiment has not been made' " (L 2.5.6). 4 One might have expected this argument to dispose Mill to some form of scepticism (whether absolute or what Richard Popkin terms "mitigated"5). On the contrary: through most editions of the Logic Mill un- hesitatingly accepts fundamental laws of science as proven verities. When laws of causation are proven by the methods of science, their proof is, by...
J. S. Mill's
Analysis is usually said to represent the peak of associationism. The chapter reproduced here is that entitled "The Association of Ideas." It is taken from the 1869 edition, published by Longmans, Green, Reoder and Dyer, London, pp. 70-116. Thought succeeds thought; idea follows idea, incessantly. If our senses are awake, we are continually receiving sensations, of the eye, the ear, the touch, and so forth; but not sensations alone. After sensations, ideas are perpetually excited of sensations formerly received; after those ideas, other ideas: and during the whole of our lives, a series of those two states of consciousness, called sensations, and ideas, is constantly going on. There is a synchronous, and a successive, order of our sensations. I have Synchronically, or at the same instant, the sight of a great variety of objects; touch of all the objects with which my body is in contact. I have Successively the sight of the flash from the mortar fired at a distance, the hearing of the report, the sight of the bomb, and of its motion in the air, the sight of its fall, the sight and hearing of its explosion, and lastly, the sight of all the effects of that explosion. Among the objects which I have thus observed synchronically, or successively; that is, from which I have had synchronical or successive sensations; there are some which I have so observed frequently; others which I have so observed not frequently: in other words, of my sensations some have been frequently synchronical, others not frequently; some frequently successive, others not frequently. Our ideas spring up, or exist, in the order in which the sensations existed, of which they are the copies. This is the general law of the "Association of Ideas"; by which term, let it be remembered, nothing is here meant to be expressed, but the order of occurrence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
On the surface, J. S. Mill and Paul Feyerabend appear to hold differing views of scientific method. Mill attempts to frame a set of rules or canons for testing evidence based on rationality and inference, whereas Feyerabend, in his so-called “epistemological anarchism”, calls for abandoning any attempt to separate the good from the bad in science according to a fixed view of rationality. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, Feryerabend cites Mill as the originator of what he (Feyerabend) has to say in defense of epistemological anarchy. First, I argue that those aspects of Mill’s On Liberty that are suggestive of an anti-rationalist philosophy are entirely compatible with the theory of scientific method Mill offers in A System of Logic. Second, in the process of reconciling these two works of Mill, I hope to shed light on how we are to understand Feyerabend’s critique of methodological dogmatism.
Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index. "A landmark in intellectual history which has attracted attention far beyond its own immediate field. . . . It is written with a combination of depth and clarity that make it an almost unbroken series of aphorisms. . . . Kuhn does not permit truth to be a criterion of scientific theories, he would presumably not claim his own theory to be true. But if causing a revolution is the hallmark of a superior paradigm, [this book] has been a resounding success." âNicholas Wade, Science "Perhaps the best explanation of [the] process of discovery." âWilliam Erwin Thompson, New York Times Book Review "Occasionally there emerges a book which has an influence far beyond its originally intended audience. . . . Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . . . has clearly emerged as just such a work." âRon Johnston, Times Higher Education Supplement "Among the most influential academic books in this century." âChoice One of "The Hundred Most Influential Books Since the Second World War," Times Literary Supplement
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