Social Rules: Origin; Character; Logic; Change
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The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions.
Others, though, for instance the requirements of practical rationality, seem at least to be candidates for such a reduction. He famously criticizes the notion that all political duties arise from an implicit contract that binds later generations who were not party to the original explicit agreement. Finally, Chapter Five shows how utilitarianism accounts for justice. The other, originating with economists, emphasizes cost considerations and invites mathematical treatment, often in game-theoretical models for problems of coordination—models that some philosophers have taken up as well. They are types of pleasure and uneasiness that are associated with the passions of pride and humility, love and hatred: when we feel moral approval of another we tend to love or esteem her, and when we approve a trait of our own we are proud of it.
By the aid of this theory, every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient voucher and justification. There never was such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices. And the chief strength of this false philosophy in morals, politics, and religion, lies in the appeal which it is accustomed to make to the evidence of mathematics and of the cognate branches of physical science.
To expel it from these, is to drive it from its stronghold. Intuitionism, however, is often taken to be on much firmer ground than empiricism when it comes to accounting for our knowledge of mathematics and logic.
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But this leaves Mill with the problem of accounting for the apparent necessity of such truths—a necessity which seems to rule out their origin in experience. It should be noted that logic goes beyond formal logic for Mill and into the conditions of truth more generally.
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The text has the following basic structure. Book I addresses names and propositions. Book IV discusses a variety of operations of the mind, including observation, abstraction and naming, which are presupposed in all induction or instrumental to more complicated forms of induction. Book V reveals fallacies of reasoning. In fact, the human sciences can be understood as themselves natural sciences with human objects of study.
The point of the distinction between verbal and real propositions is, first, to stress that all real propositions are a posteriori. Second, the distinction emphasizes that verbal propositions are empty of content; they tell us about language i. In Kantian terms, Mill wants to deny the possibility of synthetic a priori propositions, while contending that we can still make sense of our knowledge of subjects like logic and mathematics.
Mill divides names into general and singular names. All names, except proper names e.
Ringo, Buckley, etc and names that signify an attribute only e. That is, they both connote or imply some attribute s and denote or pick out individuals that fall under that description.
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Instead, it operates like a proper name in that its meaning derives entirely from what it denotes. The meaning of a typical proposition is that the thing s denoted by the subject has the attribute s connoted by the predicate. But this appears untenable because the statement seems informative.
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Verbal propositions assert something about the meaning of names rather than about matters of fact. As such, verbal propositions are empty of content and they are the only things we know a priori , independently of checking the correspondence of the proposition to the world. Such propositions convey information that is not already included in the names or terms employed, and their truth or falsity depends on whether or not they correspond to relevant features of the world. He claims, for example, that the law of contradiction i. They are, like the axioms of geometry, experimental truths , not truths known a priori.
They represent generalizations or inductions from observation—very well-justified inductions, to be sure, but inductions nonetheless. This leads Mill to say that the necessity typically ascribed to the truths of mathematics and logic by his intuitionist opponents is an illusion, thereby undermining intuitionist argumentative fortifications at their strongest point.
A System of Logic thus represents the most thorough attempt to argue for empiricism in epistemology, logic, and mathematics before the twentieth century for the best discussion of this point, see Skorupski There are some other topics covered in the System of Logic that are of interest.
How can it be informative? Mill discounts two common views about the syllogism, namely, that it is useless because it tells us what we already know and that it is the correct analysis of what the mind actually does when it discovers truths. To understand why Mill discounts these ways of thinking about deduction, we need to understand his views on inference. The key point here is that all inference is from particular to particular. What the mind does in making a deductive inference is not to move from a universal truth to a particular one.
Rather, it moves from truths about a number of particulars to a smaller number or one.
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Though general propositions are not necessary for reasoning, they are heuristically useful as are the syllogisms that employ them. They aid us in memory and comprehension. He focuses on four different methods of experimental inquiry that attempt to single out from the circumstances that precede or follow a phenomenon the ones that are linked to the phenomenon by an invariable law.
System , III. That is, we test to see if a purported causal connection exists by observing the relevant phenomena under an assortment of situations. If we wish, for example, to know whether a virus causes a disease, how can we prove it? What counts as good evidence for such a belief? The four methods of induction or experimental inquiry—the methods of agreement, of difference, of residues, and of concomitant variation—provide answers to these questions by showing what we need to demonstrate in order to claim that a causal law holds.
Can we show, using the method of difference, that when the virus is not present the disease is also absent? If so, then we have some grounds for believing that the virus causes the disease. The volition, a state of our mind, is the antecedent; the motion of our limbs in conformity to the volition, is the consequent.
The questions that readily arise are how, under this view, can one take the will to be free and how can we preserve responsibility and feelings of choice? We have the power to alter our own character. Though our own character is formed by circumstances, among those circumstances are our own desires. We cannot directly will our characters to be one way rather than another, but we can will actions that shape those characters.
Mill addresses an obvious objection: what leads us to will to change our character? Mill agrees. Our desire to change our character is determined largely by our experience of painful and pleasant consequences associated with our character. If we have the desire to change our character, we find that we can.
Social Rules: Origin; Character; Logic; Change
For Mill, this is a thick enough notion of freedom to avoid fatalism. One of the basic problems for this kind of naturalistic picture of human beings and wills is that it clashes with our first-person image of ourselves as reasoners and agents. As Kant understood, and as the later hermeneutic tradition emphasizes, we think of ourselves as autonomous followers of objectively given rules Skorupski , It seems extremely difficult to provide a convincing naturalistic account of, for example, making a choice without explaining away as illusory our first-person experience of making choices.
Though we may have difficulty running experiments in the human realm, that realm and its objects are, in principle, just as open to the causal explanations we find in physics or biology. Men, however, in a state of society, are still men; their actions and passions are obedient to the laws of individual human nature. Men are not, when brought together, converted into another kind of substance with different properties. Comte takes sociology rather than psychology to be the most basic of human sciences and takes individuals and their conduct to be best understood through the lens of social analysis.
To put it simplistically, for Comte, the individual is an abstraction from the whole—its beliefs and conduct are determined by history and society. We understand the individual best, on this view, when we see the individual as an expression of its social institutions and setting. This naturally leads to a kind of historicism. Though Mill recognized the important influences of social institutions and history on individuals, for him society is nevertheless only able to shape individuals through affecting their experiences—experiences structured by universal principles of human psychology that operate in all times and places.
David Braybrooke holds the Centennial Commission Chair in the Liberal Arts ( Government and Philosophy) at the University of Texas at Austin. He belongs with. This collection is a pioneering effort to bring together in fruitful interaction the two dominant perspectives on social rules. One, shared by.
See Mandelbaum , ff. And these two assertions are only reconcileable, if relativity to us is understood in the altogether trivial sense, that we know them only so far as our faculties permit. Hamilton therefore seems to want to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to knowledge of the external world.
One point of historical interest about the Examination is the impact that it had on the way that the history of philosophy is taught. All three were proponents of the associationist school of psychology, whose roots go back to Hobbes and especially Locke and whose members included Gay, Hartley, and Priestly in the eighteenth century and the Mills, Bain, and Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century.
Mill distinguishes between the a posteriori and a priori schools of psychology. The associationist psychologists, then, would attempt to explain mental phenomena by showing them to be the ultimate product of simpler components of experience e. Thus, these psychologists attempt to explain our idea of an orange or our feelings of greed as the product of simpler ideas connected by association. Part of the impulse for this account of psychology is its apparent scientific character and beauty. Associationism attempts to explain a large variety of mental phenomena on the basis of experience plus very few mental laws of association.
It therefore appeals to those who are particularly drawn to simplicity in their scientific theories. Another attraction of associationist psychology, however, is its implications for views on moral education and social reform.
Social Rules
If the contents of our minds, including beliefs and moral feelings, are products of experiences that we undergo connected according to very simple laws, then this raises the possibility that human beings are capable of being radically re-shaped—that our natures, rather than being fixed, are open to major alteration. In other words, if our minds are cobbled together by laws of association working on the materials of experience, then this suggests that if our experiences were to change, so would our minds.
This doctrine tends to place much greater emphasis on social and political institutions like the family, the workplace, and the state, than does the doctrine that the nature of the mind offers strong resistance to being shaped by experience i. Associationism thereby fits nicely into an agenda of reform, because it suggests that many of the problems of individuals are explained by their situations and the associations that these situations promote rather than by some intrinsic feature of the mind.
As Mill puts it in the Autobiography in discussing the conflict between the intuitionist and a posteriori schools:. The practical reformer has continually to demand that changes be made in things which are supported by powerful and widely spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and indefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensable part of his argument to shew, how these powerful feelings had their origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible. There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate elements of human nature…I have long felt that the prevailing tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement.
It offers a candidate for a first principle of morality, a principle that provides us with a criterion distinguishing right and wrong. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it had been explicitly invoked by three British intellectual factions.