John Stuart Mill

A British Socrates

K. N Demetriou, A. Loizides, K. N Demetriou, A. Loizides

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780230369283
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137321718
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This edited collection highlights the inquisitive and synthetic aspects of John Stuart Mill's mode of philosophising while exploring various aspects of Mill's thought, intellectual development and influence. The contributors to this volume discuss a number of Mill's ideas including those on political participation, democracy, liberty and justice.

1

The Philosophy of Error and Liberty of Thought: J.S. Mill on Logical Fallacies

Frederick Rosen

I

Logic lays down the general principles and laws of the search after truth; the conditions which, whether recognised or not, must actually have been observed if the mind has done its work rightly. Logic is the intellectual complement of mathematics and physics. Those sciences give the practice, of which Logic is the theory. It declares the principles, rules, and precepts, of which they exemplify the observance.

Of Logic I venture to say, even if limited to that of mere ratiocination, the theory of names, propositions, and the syllogism, that there is no part of intellectual education which is of greater value, or whose place can so ill be supplied by anything else. Its uses, it is true, are chiefly negative; its function is, not so much to teach us to go right, as to keep us from going wrong. But in the operations of the intellect it is so much easier to go wrong than right; [ . . . ] Logic points out all the possible ways in which, starting from true premises, we may draw false conclusions.

Logic is the great disperser of hazy and confused thinking: it clears up the fogs which hide from us our own ignorance, and make us believe that we understand a subject when we do not.

To those who think lightly of school logic, I say, take the trouble to learn it. You will easily do so in a few weeks, and you will see whether it is of no use to you in making your mind clear, and keeping you from stumbling in the dark over the most outrageous fallacies.¹

These brief passages have been taken from a discussion of logic in J.S. Mill’s Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews (1867). They contain not only advice to young students as to how to pursue their studies but also allusions to his own intellectual development.² Here we find a restatement of his belief in the role of logic in the search for truth, the relationship between logic and other sciences like mathematics and physics, his Socratic belief in looking into and through “the fogs which hide us from our own ignorance,” and his acceptance of Aristotelian scholastic logic with its emphasis on avoiding “stumbling in the dark over the most outrageous fallacies.”

Mill’s major work on logic, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843) is not as carefully studied nowadays as are his more accessible works, On Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism (1861). Despite this recent neglect, there is a considerable body of philosophical literature which concentrates on the Logic, as, for example, in the work of Jackson, Anschutz, Ryan, Skorupski, and Scarre, to name a few.³ Unfortunately, none of these commentators have taken much, if any, notice of the fifth book of the Logic, which is a substantial essay concerned with fallacies. Yet, as we have seen in the passages quoted above, Mill seemed to place the detection of fallacies at the heart of the study of logic.

At the time Mill wrote the Logic, the inclusion of material on fallacies was somewhat contentious. That the study of fallacies (though often rejected in the modern period) persisted in the early part of the nineteenth century was due to the influence of Aristotelian logic, and, particularly, the influence of Aristotle’s On Sophistical Refutations.⁴ That this study of dialectical argument should accompany the main demonstrative or didactic arguments centred on the syllogism ensured forever, it seemed, that the study of fallacies should form part of logic generally. The scholastic tradition in logic, still followed in English universities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and enshrined in the textbooks of Robert Sanderson and Henry Aldrich, faithfully repeated the Aristotelian list of 13 fallacies.⁵ Instruction in fallacies was doubtless regarded as light and often amusing relief from the otherwise tedious study of the syllogism.

Many modern philosophers, however, had followed their rejection of Aristotelian philosophy generally with a rejection or severe curtailment of the usual treatment of fallacies. Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, for example, not only failed to consider the traditional list of fallacies, but also contained a critique of Aristotle and of the relevance of the syllogism as the instrument of reason and source of knowledge.⁶ Traditional logic, for Locke, was regarded as productive only of useless disputes, which were of little benefit to society. “For notwithstanding these learned Disputants, these all-knowing Doctors,” he wrote, “it was to the unscholastick Statesman that the Governments of the World owed their Peace, Defence, and Liberties; and from the illiterate and contemned Mechanic (a Name of Disgrace) that they received the improvements of useful Arts.”⁷ For Locke, and for others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the study of problems in logic, and, particularly, those that concentrated on the syllogism, tended to be translated into the study of language and/or psychology. In this development (and Locke’s Essay is a good example) the traditional exposition of fallacies was omitted, as contributing more to disputes and their enjoyment than to the acquisition of knowledge.

In contrast with the example of modern philosophers rejecting Aristotelian logic and the study of fallacies, as derived from the Sophistical Refutations, Mill, as we have seen, fully embraced the traditional study of fallacies. This somewhat unusual starting point for a nineteenth-century philosopher with thoroughly progressive views owed a good deal to Richard Whately’s Elements of Logic (1826). Whately sought to revitalize the study of logic at Oxford by restating Aristotelian logic in a new context, and, in the process, abandoned what seemed to be the list of Aristotelian fallacies in favour of a new schema. The underlying momentum for the new context might be described as Coleridgean. Whately’s Elements of Logic and companion work, Elements of Rhetoric (1827), were first published in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, a work inspired by Coleridge to advance progressive views which could be seen as emerging out of traditional thought and institutions.⁸ Whately’s return to Aristotelian logic, set forth in a contemporary context with modern examples and without the baggage of scholasticism, seemed to be an ideal expression of this vision.⁹ I have discussed Mill’s encounter with Whately’s Elements of Logic and his essays on “Bentham” (1838) and “Coleridge” (1840) elsewhere,¹⁰ and I will simply note here that Mill’s two essays on the leading British thinkers of the age were written and published at the same time (between 1838 and 1840) as the book on fallacies in the Logic was drafted and completed.¹¹ Mill’s retention and development of the study of logical fallacies was linked to his enthusiasm for the belief that the contrary ideas of Bentham and Coleridge might be successfully combined in thought and debate.

There were other factors which might have led Mill to turn to and develop the traditional study of logical fallacies. Jeremy Bentham’s Book of Fallacies was published in 1824, and Bentham claimed that he was in certain respects the first person since Aristotle to reconsider the forms of logical fallacies.¹² Although Bentham was strongly criticized by Whately for the one-sidedness of his radicalism (rather than for his treatment of fallacies), Mill thought that Whately was “unnecessarily severe” in his criticisms.¹³ As we shall see, Mill also adopted one category from Bentham’s work. However, Mill never fully endorsed Bentham’s study of fallacies and tended to ignore it, as well as George Bentham’s elaborate discussion of fallacies based on it.¹⁴ A more general and pervasive influence of Bentham on Mill’s treatment of fallacies might be found in the conceptions of evidence developed by Bentham in the Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827), edited by Mill.¹⁵

Mill also might have claimed the authority of Francis Bacon for his approach to traditional logic. Although many philosophers believed that Bacon was the champion of the rejection of the syllogism and of Aristotelian logic generally in favour of a rigorous inductive approach, Mill saw in Bacon a forerunner of his own position that sought to combine induction with syllogistic logic.¹⁶ Bacon argued that, even though traditional logic “has done more to fix errors than to reveal truth,” there was no reason to attack traditional logic or even to challenge the ancient view of logic, as the new inductive system could easily exist side by side with the Aristotelian system.¹⁷ “Let there be therefore, as a boon and blessing for each side, two sources of knowledge and two ways of organizing it; and likewise two tribes of thinkers and philosophers, two clans as it were, not in any way hostile or alien to each other, but linked in mutual support [ . . . ].”¹⁸ Furthermore, Mill’s discussion of error, as we shall see, owed a good deal to Bacon’s analysis of “Idols,” and, particularly, to “Idols of the Theatre” in the Novum Organum.

Another factor that lay behind Mill’s study of fallacies was his commitment to a Socratic method in philosophy.¹⁹ Mill had been attracted to Socrates, his hero and mentor, from his earliest days. “The Socratic method,” he wrote in the “Early Draft” of the Autobiography, “[ . . . ] is unsurpassed as a discipline for abstract thought on the most difficult subjects. Nothing in modern life and education, in the smallest degree supplies its place.”²⁰ After a brief account of the Socratic elenchus, he concluded that, even as a boy, the Socratic method “took such hold on me that it became part of my own mind; and I have ever felt myself, beyond any modern that I know of except my father and perhaps beyond even him, a pupil of Plato, and cast in the mould of his dialectics.”²¹ Mill wrote his translations and brief comments on nine Platonic dialogues ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Abbreviation
• Introduction
• 1. The Philosophy of Error and Liberty of Thought: J.S. Mill on Logical Fallacies
• 2. John Stuart Mill, Romantics’ Socrates, and the Public Role of the Intellectual
• 3. The Socratic Origins of John Stuart Mill’s “Art of Life”
• 4. Mill’s Greek Ideal of Individuality
• 5. Uncelebrated Trouble Maker: John Stuart Mill as English Radicalism’s Foreign Politics Gadfly
• 6. The Philosopher in the Agora
• 7. The Spirit of Athens: George Grote and John Stuart Mill on Classical Republicanism
• 8. Three Visions of Liberty: John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin, Quentin Skinner
• 9. John Stuart Mill through Rawls
• Index