Logic Mill’s Empiricist Logic John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic falls into two principal parts.. The first two books present a system of formal logic; the remainder of the work deals wi
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Mill’s Empiricist Logic
John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic falls into two principal parts The first two books present a system of formal logic; the remainder of the work deals with the methodology of the natural and social sciences He begins the first part with an analysis of language, and in particular with a theory of naming
Mill was the first British empiricist to take formal logic seriously, and from the start he is anxious to dissociate himself from the nominalism that had been associated with empiricism since the time of Hobbes By
‘nominalism’ he means the two-name theory of the proposition: the theory that a proposition is true if and only if subject and predicate are names of the same thing The Hobbesian account, Mill says, fits only those propositions where both predicate and subject are proper names, such as ‘Tully is Cicero’ But it is a sadly inadequate theory of any other propositions
Mill uses the word ‘name’ very broadly Not only proper names like
‘Socrates’ and pronouns like ‘this’, but also definite descriptions like ‘the king who succeeded William the Conqueror’, count as names for him So too do general terms like ‘man’ and ‘wise’, and abstract nouns like ‘wisdom’ All names, whether particular or general, whether abstract or concrete, denote things; proper names denote the things they name and general terms denote the things they are true of: thus not only ‘Socrates’ but also
‘man’ and ‘wise’ denote Socrates General terms, in addition to having a denotation in this way, also have a connotation: there are items they con-note as well as items they decon-note What they concon-note are the attributes they