John Stuart Mill

Bibliography

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was an English philosopher, political economist and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory and political economy. Dubbed "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century", Mill's conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.

Mill was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by his predecessor Jeremy Bentham, and contributed significantly to the theory of the scientific method.

A member of the Liberal Party, he was also the first Member of Parliament to call for women's suffrage.

Philosophy

His Famous Philosophy is the:

Mill's Methods - are five methods of induction described by philosopher John Stuart Mill in his 1843 book: A System of Logic. They are intended to illuminate issues of causation.

1.    The Method of Agreement – this agreement says that in all cases where an instance of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, in which alone all the instances agree of the given phenomenon. This method is used to determine what is the cause of food poisoning, cold, cough and etc.

Example: You and your girlfriend went out together for a buffet dinner, then, you take beef, salad, noodles and seafood. And your girl takes noodles, beef and salad, but when you two got home you started feeling sick and experienced stomach aches. You two bought the noodles, beef and salad, but you are only one who eat seafood, so it is clearly that seafood is the cause of your illness.

2.    The Method of Difference – this method says that where you have one situation that leads to an effect, and another which does not, and the only difference is the presence of a single factor in the first situation, we can infer this factor as the cause of the effect.

Example: in this case, unlike the first example you did not feel the stomach ache. The difference is that you did not take salad. So that is probably the cause of her illness.

3.    The Joint Method – this method is a matter of applying both the method of agreement and the method of difference.

Example: You pick seafood, beef, salad, and noodles. She picks seafood, salad, and noodles. So that, the beef now is the cause this time.

4.    The Method of Concomitant Variation – The method of concomitant variation says that if across range of situation that lead to a certain effect, we find a certain property of the effect varying in a factor common to those situations, then we can infer that factor as the cause.

5.    The Method of Residues – According to the method of residues, if we have a range of factors believed to be the causes of a range of effects, and we have reason to believe that all the factors, except one factor C, are causes for all the effects, except one, then we should infer that C is the cause of the remaining effect.

General Comments on Mill’s Methods

Mill's methods should come as no surprise, as these rules articulate some of the principles we use implicitly in causal reasoning in everyday life. But it is important to note the limitations of these rules.

• First, the rules presuppose that we have a list of candidates causes to consider. But the rules themselves do not tell us how to come up with such a list. This would depend on our knowledge or informed guesses about likely causes of the effects.
• The other assumption presupposed by these methods is that among the list of factors under consideration, only one factor is the unique cause of the effect. But there is no guarantee that this assumption always holds. Also, sometimes the cause might be some complicated combinations of various factors.

Conclusion

My opinion this Philosophy is that, this method/s can help everyone to their everyday life. Especially the Method of Agreement and Method of Difference. In everyday, we didn’t notice that we are already using the Method of Agreement, for example we need to find out what is the cause of our illness. So here in The Method of Difference it shows that the effect to someone. Just like on the example. It focusses more on the effect to others.