A foundational text in modern empiricist method, published in 1843 by Victorian England's foremost philosopher of political and social life.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1860.

No mathematical background is necessary to appreciate this classic of probability theory, which remains unsurpassed in its clarity, readability, and sheer charm. Its author, British logician John Venn (1834-1923), popularized the famous Venn Diagrams that are commonly used in teaching elementary mathematics.

The Philosophy of Science, if the phrase were to be understood in the comprehensive sense which most naturally offers itself to our thoughts, ...

(1979). William Whewell, natural theology and the philosophy of science in mid nineteenth century Britain. Annals of Science: Vol. 36, No. 5, pp. 493-516.

This article examines the nineteenth-century debate about scientific method between John Stuart Mill and William Whewell. Contrary to standard interpretations (given, for example, by Achinstein, Buchdahl, Butts, and Laudan), I argue that their debate was not over whether to endorse an inductive methodology but rather over the nature of inductive reasoning in science and the types of conclusions yielded by it. Whewell endorses, while Mill rejects, a type of inductive reasoning in which inference is employed to find a property or (...) cause shared by the observed members of a class, which is generalized to all its members, including the unobserved ones. Because of this, Whewell’s inductivism, unlike Mill’s, is able to yield theoretical hypotheses referring to unob-servables such as molecules and light waves. This is contrary to the claims of some critics of inductivism who argue that inductivism is unable to yield such hypotheses. Moreover, I suggest that Whewell’s view of induction conforms more closely than Mill’s view to the practice of scientists such as Kepler, Newton, and Fresnel, who do attempt to discover laws involving unobservables. (shrink)

Despite its basically syllogistic character, Richard Whately's Elements of logic presents the subject in a modern theoretical setting. Whately, for instance, regarded logic as an abstract science, and defined the syllogism as a purely formal device to be used as a means of determining the validity of all arguments. In this paper, I argue that such instances of abstractive ascent place Whately's theory in closer proximity to later 19th-century developments than to the work of his 17th-century predecessors. In addition to (...) discussing the theory itself, other sections deal with its historical setting, and various reactions to it. (shrink)

Emphasizing the debt of science to nonspecialist intellectuals, Theodore Porter describes in detail the nineteenth-century background that produced the burst of modern statistical innovation of the early 1900s. Statistics arose as a study of society--the science of the statist--and the pioneering statistical physicists and biologists, Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Galton, each introduced statistical models by pointing to analogies between his discipline and social science.

Autobiography of John Stuart Mill by John Stuart Mill 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. He has been called "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 control. Mill expresses (...) his view on freedom by illustrating how an individual's drive to better their station, and for self-improvement, is the sole source of true freedom. Only when an individual is able to attain such improvements, without impeding others in their own efforts to do the same, can true freedom prevail. Mill's linking of freedom and self-improvement has inspired many. By establishing that individual efforts to excel have worth, Mill was able to show how they should achieve self-improvement without harming others, or society at large. (shrink)

Explores the development of the ideas of evolutionary biology, particularly as affected by the increasing understanding of genetics and of the chemical basis of inheritance.

Ethics and jurisprudence are liable to the remark in common with logic. Almost every writer having taken a different view of some of the particulars which ...

This dissertation is a conceptual and historical examination of the writings of nineteenth-century British frequentists Robert Leslie Ellis, John Stuart Mill, George Boole and John Venn. I focus on two issues in their works: the rise of anti-psychologism as a concern for objectivity, and the reference class problem as a challenge to the objectivity of probability. I thereby aim to reassess the modern claim that the frequency conceptions of probability provided an objective interpretation of probability. Anti-psychologism refers to the ways (...) in which a psychological understanding of cognition was barred from philosophy of logic as either irrelevant or misleading. It started to take root in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when several logicians and psychologists, including Mill and Venn, no longer countenanced logic and psychology as concordant or complementary disciplines. Contrasting Boole's "conceptual view of logic" with "the material view of logic" of Mill and Venn, I show how a concern for objectivity arose with the development of empirical psychology in mid-nineteenth century. That was a concern for aperspectival objectivity. On the other hand, I argue that the very accounts of probability that Mill and Venn advanced could not sustain aperspectival objectivity. In their works emerged the reference class problem, i.e., the problem of characterizing the populations that can provide reliable statistical information. Mill's "real kinds" and Venn's "natural kinds" were attempts at such a characterization. Those attempts were frustrated by nominalist and historicist considerations. Neither Mill nor Venn could agree with the kind of theological realism that had informed Ellis's approach to the foundations of probability. Venn's philosophy of probability was influenced by the theories of evolution, which depicted a universe in which there was only historical becoming. As a result, the reference class had to have boundaries in both time and space, and those boundaries could be decided only by the "good judgment" of the statistician. (shrink)