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John Stuart Mill's Method In Principle and Practice: A Review of the Evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Samuel Hollander  and
Sandra Peart
Samuel Hollander
Affiliation:
LATAPSES, Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis/CNRS, France
Sandra Peart
Affiliation:
Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea OH
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Extract

Our concern is John Stuart Mill's methodological pronouncements, his actual practice, and the relationship between them. We argue that verification played a key role in Mill's method, both in principle and in practice. Our starting point is the celebrated declaration regarding verification in the essay On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It (1836/ 1967; hereafter Essay): “By the method à priori we mean … reasoning from an assumed hypothesis; which … is the essence of all science which admits of general reasoning at all. To verify the hypothesis itself à posteriori, that is, to examine whether the facts of any actual case are in accordance with it, is no part of the business of science at all, but of the application of science” (Mill 1836/1967, p. 325). The apparent position that the basic economic theory is impervious to predictive failure emerges also in a sharp criticism of the à posteriori method:

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , December 1999 , pp. 369 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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