A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive

by John Stuart Mill

A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive : being a connected view of the principles of evidence and the methods of scientific investigation Mill's Logic, first published in 1843, firmly established Mill as the leader of the empirical school of logic. A System of Logic is the first major installment of his comprehensive restatement of an empiricist and utilitarian position. It begins the attack on ""intuitionism"" which Mill carried on throughout his life, and makes plain his belief that social planning and political action should rely primarily on scientific knowledge, not on authority, custom, revelation, or prescription. Contents include: OF NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS - Of the Necessity of commencing with an Analysis of Language, Of Names, Of the Things denoted by Names, Of Proposition, Of the Import of Propositions, Of Propositions merely Verbal, Of the nature of Classification and the five Predicables, Of Definition. OF REASONING - Of Inference, or Reasoning in General, Of Ratiocination, or Syllogism, Of the Functions, and logical Values of Syllogism, Of trains of Reasoning and Deductive Sciences, Of Demonstration and Necessary truths. OF INDUCTION - Observations on Induction in General, On the Ground of Induction, Of the Laws of Nature, Of The Law of Universal Causation, Of The Composition of Causes, Of Observation and Experiment, Four Methods of Experimental Enquiry, Miscellaneous Examples, Plurality of Causes, Of the Deductive Method, Explanation of Laws of Nature. Keywords: Knowledge, Theory of; Logic; Science -- Methodology

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Logic, Classics, Nonfiction, Economics, Sociology

678 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1843

About the author

John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham's.

Reviews

[Irene · Rating 4 out of 5]

be prepared...this stuff is dense as concrete

[Elia Mantovani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Provare a scrivere una breve recensione di opere monumentali come il Sistema di Mill è senza dubbio impegnativo e probabilmente impossibile. In questo ardimentoso trattato, che negli anni '40 del XIX secolo fece per la prima volta circolare il nome del grande teoreta Inglese, Mill indaga la logica così come intesa in tempi moderni, ossia come la scienza delle scienze, la ragione delle principali strutture del pensiero scientifico. La giustificazione dell'induzione in apologia di Bacone e accusa di Hume si risolve, sostanzialmente, in un accennato probabilismo (tesi, tra l'altro, alla quale perverrà anche Russell, del quale Mill fu padrino battesimale), come suggerito dalle ampie considerazioni sopra l'opera di Laplace. Interessanti le riflessioni in merito al necessitarismo, questo sì di matrice humeana, che l'Autore cerca di combinare con l'idea di un libero arbitrio compatibile con la legge di causazione che introduce l'uomo in un sistema logicamente determinato. Certo, alla luce della filosofia della scienza del secolo scorso il teorema di uniformità della natura lascia insoddisfatti, ma è indubbio che questo sia stata una delle posizioni maggiormente diffuse in difesa del ragionamento induttivo (che per Mill è il vero motore del progresso teorico, essendo il sillogismo nient'altro se non una particolare guisa di petitio principi). Come osservava Feyerabend, tuttavia, l'eredità di Mill presso gli epistemologi del Novecento è incredibile: il "metodo della differenza" non è niente se non una formulazione più tradizionale di quel "modus tollens" sul quale Popper avrebbe eretto un intero criterio logico per demarcare scienza e pseudo-scienza. Un po' troppo dal sapore positivista, secondo me, l'indagine conclusiva sui metodi delle scienze sociali che, se mai godranno dello statuto autonomo delle scienze dure, secondo il filosofo possono essere oggetto di inferenze conclusive se si osservano le tendenze ricorrenti durante la storia e la cosiddetta "etologia". Il testo, insomma, offre una doviziosissima panoramica della storia della logica da Aristotele a Kant passando per gli Scolastici, Leibniz e gli Empiristi e, per quanto la lettura non possa certo dirsi alla portata di ognuno, è sicuramente una pietra miliare nella storia della logica e dell'epistemologia che può arricchire la visione della teoria del ragionamento nei suoi sviluppi e nei suoi dipanamenti concettuali.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half was about analytical logic, which I found more compelling than the second half, which dealt with the logic of language, perhaps.

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This, while not an overly complex work, will remain one of my favorites in the field of philosophy, science, and logic. The general idea is basically that it is a compendium of different ideas. A pot pourri of certain stances, philosophies, and overall questions, many of which, even within science, have remain unanswered to this present day. The idea of Free Will and determinism, the validity of the scientific method, the foundation of language, syllogisms and how they were derived from Aristotle, the overall methodology of categorization, biological determinism, the foundations of astronomical observations, the different questions of sociologically correct methods in generating collective behavioral data, the overall questions of the validity of certain schools of thought, such as economics, and their application to the state, all of these questions are gone over in great detail. This is a great book, and is only valued because of its overall breadth, not necessarily the depth.

[Almustafa Couch · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good though rather technical philosophical book, useful to have a philosophical dictionary as a companion. It does set out a pattern requisite for rational thought and, does express its superiority to inconsistent emotional decisions, though it (the suggested method) does allow for emotional input.
His defence of Malthus,"An essay on the principal of population."may have been salient in the mid-1800s but is now demonstrably incorrect, as shown by freely available data. And using Mills methods Malthus's claims would have been refuted, but given that the data was not available Mill's assertion can be forgiven.