Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic. W. Stebbing
Method in the Social Science
ANALYSIS
OF
MILL'S LOGIC.
INTRODUCTION.
No adequate definition is possible till the properties of the thing to be defined are known. Previously we can define only the scope of the inquiry. Now, Logic has been considered as both the science of reasoning, i.e. the analysis of the mental process when we reason, and the art of reasoning, i.e. the rules for the process. The term reasoning, however, is not wide enough. Reasoning means either syllogising, or (and this is its truer sense) the drawing inferences from assertions already admitted. But the Aristotelian or Scholastic logicians included in Logic terms and propositions, and the Port Royal logicians spoke of it as equivalent to the art of thinking. Even popularly, accuracy of classification, and the extent of command over premisses, are thought clearer signs of logical powers than accuracy of deduction. On the other hand, the definition of logic as a 'science treating of the operations of the understanding in the search of truth,' though wide enough, would err through including truths known from intuition; for, though doubtless many seeming intuitions are processes of inference, questions as to what facts are real intuitions belong to Metaphysics, not to Logic.
Logic is the science, not of Belief, but of Proof, or Evidence. Almost all knowledge being matter of inference, the fields of Logic and of Knowledge coincide; but the two differ in so far that Logic does not find evidence, but only judges of it. All science is composed of data, and conclusions thence: Logic shows what relations must subsist between them. All inferential knowledge is true or not, according as the laws of Logic have been obeyed or not. Logic is Bacon's Ars Artium, the science of sciences. Genius sometimes employs laws unconsciously; but only genius: as a rule, the advances of a science have been ever found to be preceded by a fuller knowledge of the laws of Logic applicable to it. Logic, then, may be described as the science of the operations of the understanding which aid in the estimation of evidence. It includes not only the process of proceeding from the known to the unknown, but, as auxiliary thereto, Naming, Definition, and Classification. Conception, Memory, and other like faculties, are not treated by it; but it presupposes them. Our object, therefore, must be to analyse the process of inference and the subsidiary operations, besides framing canons to test any given evidence. We need not, however, carry the analysis beyond what is necessary for the practical uses of Logic; for one step in analysis is good without a second, and our purpose is simply to see the difference between good and ill processes of inference. Minuter analysis befits Metaphysics; though even that science, when stepping beyond the interrogation of our consciousness, or rather of our memory, is, as all other sciences, amenable to Logic.
BOOK I
NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS.
CHAPTER I.
ON THE NECESSITY OF COMMENCING WITH AN ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE IN LOGIC.
The fact of Logic being a portion of the art of thinking, and of thought's chief instrument being words, is one reason why we must first inquire into the right use of words. But further, the import of propositions cannot really be examined apart from that of words; and (since whatever can be an object of belief assumes the form of a proposition, and in propositions all truth and error lie) this is a paramount reason why we must, as a preliminary, consider the import of names, the neglecting which, and confining ourselves to things, would indeed be to discard all past experience. The right method is, to take men's classifications of things as shown by names, correcting them as we proceed.
CHAPTER II.
NAMES.
Hobbes's assertion that a name is a sign, not of a thing, but of our conception of it, is untrue (unless he merely mean that the conception, and not the thing itself, is imparted to the hearer); for we intend by a name, not only to make men conceive what we conceive, but to inform them what we believe as to the things themselves.
Names may be divided according to five principles of classification. The first way of dividing them is into General (not as equivalent to Collective) and Individual names; the second, into Concrete, i.e. the names of objects, and Abstract, i.e. the names of attributes (though Locke improperly extends the term to all names gained by abstraction, that is, to all general names). An abstract name is sometimes general, e.g. colour, and sometimes singular, e.g. milk-whiteness. It may be objected to calling attributes abstract, that also concrete adjectives, e.g. white, are attributes. But a word is the name of the things of which it can be predicated. Hence, white is the name of all things so coloured, given indeed because of the quality, but really the name of the thing, and no more the name of the quality than are names generally, since every one of them, if it signifies anything at all, must imply an attribute.
The third division is into Connotative and Non-connotative (the latter being wrongly called Absolute). By connotative are meant, not (as Mr. James Mill explains it) words which, pointing directly to one thing, tacitly refer to another, but words which denote a subject and imply an attribute; while non-connotatives signify a subject only, or attribute only. All concrete general names are connotative. They are also called denominative, because the subject denoted receives a common name (e.g. snow is named white) from the attribute connoted. Even some abstracts are connotative, for attributes may have attributes ascribed to them, and a word which denotes attributes may connote an attribute of them;