John Stuart Mill is certainly an important name when
it comes to philosophers of science. Mill did not work directly with science as
Kant did, but he was more concerned with the logic behind science.
One of Mill’s ideas was that everything can be
explained by a law. In fact, he thought that putting a fact under a law is how
a fact is explained. He also thought that there are patterns to everything,
even the discovery of patterns, and that the purpose of science is to discover
the laws and patterns that govern our lives. All of the patterns and laws are
interconnected and can be discovered if searched for diligently enough.
Mill also had ideas on how the scientific method
should be approached and how it should work. He thought that a sort of
elimination method was how laws should be discovered. If a scientist has a
variety of hypotheses, observations should be made to disprove all but one
hypothesis, or eliminate all the others. If no hypotheses work, then new
hypotheses should be created and tested for elimination once again.
This may seem like it would be an endless way to
discover laws, but if an observation is made and viewed as a generic event,
then there are two types of hypotheses that can be formed, one based the
assumption that the event was uncaused, and one based on the assumption that it
was caused. For more specific cases, however, Mill argued that elimination
would indeed be too difficult and that the way to discover the law would then
be to gather all information possible and make an induction about what is
happening. This is much more similar to our current scientific method.
By Nicholas Moore, Section 9 group 1
For more info on John Stuart Mill, please visit http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill/#SciMet
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