Misunderstanding John Stuart Mill on science: Paul Feyerabend’s bad influence

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I am indebted to Neville Chapman for drawing to my attention, and enabling me to correct, infelicities of style and mistakes of substance in an earlier version of this paper. An amplification recommended by anonymous reviewers for The Social Science Journal has also served to enhance the paper.

Notes

1 In Science in a Free Society, Feyerabend (1978, p. 86) affirms generally (not only with respect to science) that

the only way of arriving at a useful judgement of what is supposed to be the truth, or the correct procedure is to become acquainted with the widest possible range of alternatives. The reasons were explained by Mill in his immortal essay On Liberty. It is not possible to improve upon his arguments.

(See also Feyerabend, 1981, p. 65, and Feyerabend, 1987, p. 33.)

2 Reviewers for The Social Science Journal commented on the penultimate version of this paper that my approach to reading Mill’s texts is historical and that as such it differs from the approach of Feyerabend and Staley, both approaches being valid according to the Journal’s reviewers. They say that the approach of Feyerabend and Staley is “to interpret a text and use it as a springboard for developing one’s own views…On this approach, Feyerabend and Staley are considering the implicit consequences of Mill’s Chapter Two…of On Liberty. Of course, this cannot be done wantonly.” My response to the reviewers is that the two approaches are overlapping rather than alternatives. The approach exemplified by Feyerabend and Staley involves, as the reviewers appreciate, interpretation of subject texts, and my argument is that, irrespective of the use they make of Mill’s texts, Feyerabend and Staley have misunderstood Mill’s intentions. My argument is furnished with detailed support through the course of the present paper.

3 Skorupski’s (1989) recent major study (approximately 400 pages), John Stuart Mill, exemplifies the failure of Mill-scholars to recognise a possible contradiction between the two famous works of Mill.

4 Staley makes the point that nowhere in On Liberty does Mill explicitly exclude science from his epistemological analysis and prescriptions. I agree; but I do not believe it can be inferred from his lack of expressness about the exclusion that Mill includes science in his analysis. My detailed exegesis in this article is designed to show that science lies outside Mill’s epistemology in On Liberty and that when Mill happens to mention science in the book he does so not in order to explicate science in terms of Liberty’s epistemology but to throw features of non-scientific knowledge into relief.

5 Mill (1977b, p. 232) moves directly on to talk about studying all modes of opinion in order to learn, but this is a distraction from the point of his argument under our consideration, for he confuses the topic of how knowledge claims are to be evaluated (the point of his argument) with the different issue of how to attain comprehensive knowledge “of a subject”.

6 Should the reader consider my handling of mentions (1) and (2) in chapter two of Liberty to be unpersuasive she/he might look on it more favourably if I point out how sure Mill is of Newtonianism’s verity in other works, such as his study of Sir William Hamilton’s thought where Mill (1979, p. 487) writes of Newton having “partially unravelled a limited portion of” the universe, and (Mill, 1979, p. 488) refers to “the system of which Newton discovered the laws”. See also Mill (1989, pp. 95–96) and recall his glowing remarks on Newton’s theory in A System of Logic which I cited earlier.

7 For more on the context of On Liberty’s composition see Mill’s Autobiography (1981, pp. 245, 247, 259–260).