Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
S00. Introduction
S01. Theories & evidence
S02. Scientific method
S03. Theory choice
S04. Causation
S05. Mill's methods
S06. Causal inferences
S07. Causal diagrams
S08. Causal fallacies
S09. Scientific research
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John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was an English philosopher who wrote on a wide range of
topics ranging from language and science to political philosophy. The so-called "Mill's
methods" are five rules for investigating causes that he has proposed. It has been
suggested that some of these rules were actually discussed by the famous Islamic
scientist and philosopher Avicenna (980-1037).
§1. The Method of Agreement
The best way to introduce Mill's methods is perhaps through an example. Suppose your
family went out together for a buffet dinner, but when you got home all of you started
feeling sick and experienced stomach aches. How do you determine the cause of the
illness? Suppose you draw up a table of the food taken by each family member :
Thus using the same kind of example, we might find that you felt somewhat sick having
eaten one oyster, whereas your sister felt rather not well having eaten a few, and your
father became critically ill having eaten ten in a row. Since the variation in the number of
oysters corresponds to variation in the severity of the illness, it would be rational to infer
that the illnesses were caused by the oysters.
First, the rules presuppose that we have a list of candidate causes to consider. But
the rules themselves do not tell us how to come up with such a list. In reality this
would depend on our knowledge or informed guesses about likely causes of the
effects.
The other assumption presupposed by these methods is that among the list of
factors under consideration, only one factor is the unique cause of the effect. But
there is no guarantee that this assumption always holds. Also, sometimes the cause
might be some complicated combinations of various factors.