John Stuart Mill's Method In Principle and Practice: A Review of the Evidence

Samuel Hollander and Sandra Peart

Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 1999, vol. 21, issue 4, 369-397

Abstract: Our concern is John Stuart Mill's methodological pronouncements, his actual practice, and the relationship between them. We argue that verification played a key role in Mill's method, both in principle and in practice. Our starting point is the celebrated declaration regarding verification in the essay On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It (1836/ 1967; hereafter Essay): “By the method à priori we mean … reasoning from an assumed hypothesis; which … is the essence of all science which admits of general reasoning at all. To verify the hypothesis itself à posteriori, that is, to examine whether the facts of any actual case are in accordance with it, is no part of the business of science at all, but of the application of science” (Mill 1836/1967, p. 325). The apparent position that the basic economic theory is impervious to predictive failure emerges also in a sharp criticism of the à posteriori method:

Date: 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:jhisec:v:21:y:1999:i:04:p:369-397_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().