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Mill's Two Views on Belief
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
Philosophical traditions often bear the seeds of their own destruction.Their seminal insights are achieved in part by ignoring or distorting certain aspects of human experience. Insights and mistakes grow from the same roots. In transitional periods, this dialectic leads to strange reversals in allegiance and to unexpected and even unnoticed shifts in philosophical doctrine. Classical empiricism presents an example of this when one shifts attention from its treatment of epistemological questions to problems of humanaction, or to the relation of knowledge and action. The empiricist analysisof knowledge in terms of the succession and conjoining of ideas and impressions in the mind leaves the mind itself a passive spectator that undergoes its contents. On this view, the human subject lacks any distinctive spontaneity or power of initiative. The mind's internal processes are conceived ofon analogy with Newtonian mechanics and are distinguished by their law-likeregularity. The subject is not, and cannot conceive itself as being, a kindof agency. Historically, the consequences of this are evident in Berkeley's difficulties regarding ‘active spirit’, of which we have ‘notions’ but not perceptions, and in the often remarked upon disparities between Parts I and III of Hume's Treatise.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1984
References
1 References to the works of John Stuart Mill are to volume and page number in the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, J. M. Robson(general editor) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967– ).
2 James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2 vols., 2nd edn, reprinted (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, 1967), Vol. I, 402–423.
3 Mill, Analysis, I, 34Iff.
4 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1888), 86.
5 Ibid., 96. On Hume's several distinct and conflicting accountsof belief, see Michael Hodges and John Lachs, ‘Hume on Belief, Review ofMetaphysics No. 1 (September 1976).
6 Mill, Analysis, I,403.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid. 405.
9 Ibid. 406.
10 Ibid. 410-411.
11 Ibid. 412.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid. 413.
14 It should be noted that Mill in this text treats the differences between sensations and ideas as another example of a distinction that is simply ‘ultimate and primordial’. Mill is thereby permitted to include sensation among the conditions for belief without having to address the question of the vivacity of ideas. Cf. Analysis, I, 412, 419ff.
15 Mill, op. cit., 403.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid. 395.
18 Ibid. 394.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid. 418.
21 Ibid. 407.
22 Ibid.
23 In the Logic, Mill grounds belief on evidence (VII, 26In.). Generally, he treats both knowledge and belief as cases of ‘justified true belief’. The difference between them appears to be that knowledge requires more complete confirmation than belief.
24 To these examples of the social nature of belief perhaps others could be added. Among the agencies tending to shape beliefs in both their form and content are ‘persecution’ (XVIII, 238) and ‘social stigma’ (XVIII, 241), both social entities.
25 In An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's PhilosophyMill writes at length about belief in the external world without resorting to any general account of belief beyond that implicit generally in English philosophy since Hume.
26 I am indebted to John Lachs for his extensive and insightful comments on earlier versions of this material.
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