Mill (Arguments of the Philosophers)

Mill (Arguments of the Philosophers)

Language: English

Pages: 448

ISBN: 0415487676

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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Only in iii. x does he draw explicit attention to this: ‘we have supposed that there was only one possible assemblage of conditions, from which the given effect could result’ (VII 434) and he tries to deal (less than satisfactorily) with the complications introduced by the possibility of a plurality of causes. This procedure does, as he says, have the advantage of simplifying the initial presentation of the methods. But it is patently unsatisfactory to have left the canonical formulation of the

heart—the autonomy and progressiveness of the individual, the historicity and interconnectedness of social institutions. His grasp of this historicity and interconnectedness was always abstract and strategic—other thinkers of the nineteenth century brought to the study of society a more concrete historical sense or a more powerful sociological imagination. But none had a purer, more objective philosophic vision. That crystalline vision was no doubt the true cause of Mill’s mental ‘crisis’;4 yet

conclude that there is irreducible disagreement about what rule to apply in some domain, we are left with two options. We can treat those who disagree with us at the purely naturalistic level, or we can conclude that there is no objective answer as to which is the right rule. In that case we take up the naturalistic stance towards our own ‘rule’ — treating it as a fact about us, rather than an objective requirement. Seen at the naturalistic level, the only visible fact underpinning the

type is determined by the connotation, or in certain cases the denotation, of the names which make it up. He was not developing an independent subject for its own sake. He wrote Book I as a preliminary to the arguments and theses which are developed in subsequent Books of the System. In its first chapter, he explains ‘the Necessity of commencing with an analysis of language’. He gives a conventional reason for doing so—logic is ‘a portion of the Art of Thinking’, language the main instrument of

transcendental and the empirical. Yet it is by no means clear that there is any intelligible problem to which Frege’s doctrine is a solution. Let us finally compare Frege’s notions of sense and reference with Mill’s notion of connotation and denotation. The main differences are: for Frege, (a) every constituent expression of a sentence has both sense and reference, as does the sentence itself; (b) incomplete expressions refer to incomplete abscract entities; (c) sentences refer to truth-values—

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