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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).
Mill's rule of agreement says that if in all cases where an effect occurs, there is a single prior
factor C that is common to all those cases, then C is the cause of the effect. According to the
table in this example, the only thing that all of you have eaten is oyster. So applying the rule
of agreement we infer that eating oyster is the cause of the illnesses.
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.