Answer to Question #154545 in Economics for Jen

Question

5 contributions of john stuart mill to economic thought

Answer 1

Mill's main work is the two-volume System of Logic (1843). He also penned Utilitarianism (1863) and A Study of the Philosophy of Sir W. Hamilton (1865) 12. It was in the latter, containing a criticism of the views of the Scottish philosopher William Hamilton (1788-1856), that Mill developed the main provisions of his phenomenalist theory of knowledge. In this area, he undoubtedly became the continuer of the tradition of classical British empiricism. For Mill, apriorism in any of its possible forms, references to the self-evidence of the given consciousness were unacceptable. The goal of the philosopher is to improve empiricism, taking into account the factor of the development of scientific knowledge and its logical processing.

At the same time, the influence of some empiricists on others in the history of British philosophy should not be understood in a simplistic way and should not only speak of continuous ideological continuity. So, for example, large-scale studies of the teachings of Hume and Berkeley began only after the appearance in the second half of the 19th century. their collected works. Mill, in particular, was one of the first to openly acknowledge the influence of Berkeleian immaterialism on him.

At the center of Mill's views was the classical problem of the relationship between matter and consciousness. In this area, he was a resolute opponent of the thesis of the dualism of two substances. Matter and consciousness were reduced by him to certain combinations of sensations. Thus, matter appears in his teaching as a "constant possibility of sensations", physical bodies - as complexes of "simultaneous possibilities of sensations". In substantiating Mill's phenomenal ontology, possible sensations play an even greater role than actual ones. In this sense, he was one of the supporters of the dispositional description of the phenomena that make up our picture of the world. Such an approach deprives matter and consciousness of substance and essentially excludes the psychophysical problem in its traditional formulation. Consciousness, in particular, he interprets as a predisposition to experience (experience) sensations. The ability to foresee and expect future sensations is inherent in the human mind, therefore, an idea of ​​possible sensations arises in it, which, according to the general empirical-sensualist attitude, enter into various associative combinations. The laws of psychological association bring organization to our senses. Relationships of mutual dependence are formed between the complexes of sensations. For example, the sensations that makeup consciousness, organized into a complex, are dependent on the complex of sensations that make up the body, and vice versa. In general, it should be borne in mind that Mill and other supporters of the phenomenalist construction of reality proceeded from the idea of ​​the most economical description and explanation of everything that happened, considering it a mistake to refer to the substantive basis of phenomena.

Language is one of the main means of organizing phenomenal experience for Mill. It is in the language that the classification of all phenomena is carried out, their assignment to one type or another. Semantic theory of Mill, who continues the traditions of empiricist nominalists of the 17th-18th centuries. (in particular, T. Hobbes) contains an empiricist theory of the meaning of names (i.e. signs). The central idea of ​​this theory is the distinction between connotation (co-designation) and denotation (designation) of names, anticipating the modern distinction of such semantic entities as meaning and meaning (intension and extension). In the first case, we mean an indication of the set of properties of the named object, in the second, an indication of the object itself, designated by a name (which can be either the grammatical subject of the sentence or any non-linguistic entity).

Connotative names directly denote their subject and indirectly indicate its properties. Such is, for example, the word "man" for Peter, John, and an unlimited number of other individuals who make up the class for which it serves as a specific common name. Such a name is given to members of this class due to their common properties (corporeality, life, presence of mind, and others). Non-connotative names either designate only an object or only indicate properties. So: “A non-meaningful word is one that means either only an object or only a property. The co-signifying word is that which means an object and embraces a property. Everything that has a property is here called an object. So, John, London, England are the essence of names, meaning only objects. Whiteness, length, virtue means only properties. Therefore, none of these names is co-signifying. But white, long, virtuous - the names are co-denoting. The word "bel" means all white objects, such as snow, paper, seafoam, etc., and embraces or, in the words of the scholastics, means the property of whiteness. " The meaning of names, according to Mill, is precisely what they mean. That is why proper grammatical names do not matter, for they do not indicate any properties. Such names are simply signs that make it possible to express the objects they designate in the language or labels that evoke images of what they designate.