The relation of inference to fact in Mill's logic ...

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CHAPTER PAGE

I. Subjective Facts as Data 7

II. The World of Objective Facts i6

Chapter I Subjective Facts As Data

The problems of logic are coming to form the center of interest in philosophical discussion. Most present controversies in the field of philosophy turn upon some difference which is fundamentally logical. There is need, therefore, to re-examine and clarify the underlying conceptions of logic. Any one of the great historical systems of logic offers a species of laboratory example of the shaping of logical concepts under some specific point of view, and the difficulties which it leaves unresolved offer valuable experimental material for further logical construction. It is with such a purpose that this paper undertakes an analysis of the relation of inference to fact in Mill's logical system.

In constructing a theory of inference Mill's problem was to reconcile the associationism of the English empirical school with the procedure of modern physical science. He occupies alternately the subjective point of view of the one position and the objective point of view of the other. This oscillation of position comes out strikingly in the varied status which he gives to facts, which are at one time the ultimate constituents of consciousness and at another time the things and events of an independent world. When stating the relation of inference to its data and thus assigning it a locus, he takes the subjective point of view. When analyzing the nature of inference and basing its validity, he takes the objective point of view. It will be well, then, at the outset, to examine his conception of both subjective and objective facts, and the transition which he seeks to effect from the one to the other. Over against both of these, facts in the mind and facts in nature, Mill naively utilizes a system of meanings which he never thinks of as sundered from the facts, yet which are assumed as logically independent in his inferential process. An examination of the system of meanings we shall postpone till after we have examined his assumption of facts, and will consider the latter apart from their meaning so far as that can be done without distortion.

The locus of inference in relation to fact, as assigned by Mill, rests on the distinction between immediate and mediate knowledge. The first is self-evident, the second reasoned. We obtain the first by intuition, the second by inference. "Truths are known to us in two ways: some are known directly, and of themselves; some through the medium of other truths. The former are the subject of Intuition; .... the latter, of Inference." ^ They are " truths known to us by immediate consciousness ' ' and ' ' conclusions which can be drawn from these. ' '^ Of these two classes of truths, the first does not require proof; such a truth carries its own evidence — "that is, is without evidence in the proper sense of the word."3 It must therefore be "known beyond possibility of question."'* One cannot but be certain of it. But only a small part of our knowledge has intuitive character.^ By far the larger portion hangs suspended from these immediate truths by a series of proofs.

This apportionment of knowledge appears on the face of it very clear and definite. At any rate it seems to offer a hopeful program: to begin with perfectly certain data and to let each step from those data be one of strict proof. Upon examination, however, the simpHcity of the matter disappears. Like the gratuitous advice to "be sure you are right, then go ahead," this program does not tell us how to know when we are right. This conception of primitive and unquestionable data, indeed, is thoroughly ambiguous. While he does not uncover its source, Mill has to acknowledge this ambiguity in two respects:

First, Mill admits that there is difference of opinion as to the kind of data from which we start. He sets in §harp contrast two theories on this point: the "ontological" theory of the Scotch school, and the empirical theory of his own English predecessors, which he defends.^ The former holds that, in addition to the data admitted by the latter school, the mind is so constituted as to know intuitively the existence and laws of operation of certain objects external to the mind, while the latter recognizes "no ultimate premises but the facts of our subjective consciousness; our sensations, emotions, intellectual states of mind, and volitions." Mill considers all thinkers to be agreed that there are some such primitive data, but to disagree as to whether or not such data are exclusively subjective. But surely the very possibility of dispute as to the character of what are to be considered primitive data is a very serious obstacle to the theory that there are any data at all to be taken as unambiguously primitive.

There is a second ambiguity of more serious character, not so explicitly recognized, though virtually acknowledged by Mill. While it

' Mill, Logic, 8th ed., Harper, igd. References to the Logic are hereafter by page numbers, without repeating the title. To make references to the Logic more definite, letters are added to designate in order each paragraph or part of paragraph on a page.

^ 196-203/ Mill, Examination of Hamilton, 137.

SUBJECTIVE FACTS AS DATA g

seems clear to him that consciousness immediately reveals the primitive data of our knowledge, which consist of our own subjective states, Mill finds it impossible in practice to determine what those data are. Assuming agreement as to their subjective character, their actual discovery in detail proves impossible. Supposed to be known "beyond the possibility of question," they are in fact unrecognizable, because they cannot be distinguished from the inferences that are drawn from them. "We may fancy that we see or feel what we in reaUty infer. A truth, or a supposed truth, which is really the result of a very rapid inference, may seem to be apprehended intuitively."' Observation, which is another name for intuition, is constantly vitiated by confusion with inference. "Observation and inference are intimately blended."^ Now if we ever mistake inference for observation, it surely follows that we can never be sure we have not done so. There is no safe criterion by which to distinguish the two; for the apparent self-evidence of immediate intuition, our only resource in the case, is admitted to be liable to fail. It is idle to urge "a correct discrimination between that, in a result of observation, which has really been perceived, and that which is an inference from the perception,"^ for the supposed purity of the observation may still be only our "fancy." "From my senses," Mill claims, "I have only the sensations, and those are genuine. "* No doubt they would be genuine if I could be sure that they are truly mere sensations. " Errors of sense," he says again, "are erroneous inferences from sense; .... the deception .... is in my judgment. "^ But since such errors are always possible, how can I know that there are no further errors of judgment lurking in what I fancy to be perception ?

Evidently this distinction between intuition and inference proves unworkable, and breaks down for lack of a criterion of discrimination between the two. If we press the difficulty farther to discover its precise nature, we find it involved in Mill's theory of consciousness, or of experience, as consisting of given mental states. An experience of that kind would properly leave no room for inference; and in grafting inference upon it Mill introduces an alien element in contradiction with his premises. This point will repay closer examination.

' 2od. Cf. Mill, Berkeley, 278.

* 4SO&. So Mill contrasts "experience" with "a mistaken supposition of experience" {igsd), or with "a superficial semblance of experience" (196a).

3451C. "We ought to know what part of the assertion rests on consciousness, and is therefore indisputable, what part on inference, and is therefore questionable" (S45c).

Mill professes himself an adherent of Berkeleyan idealism, which he received from his father in the form of an elaborated associational psychology. To this school of thinkers it seems axiomatic that only our own mental states are immediately known to us. It inevitably follows that consciousness is shut up to its own subjective contents, and that the knowledge of anything else, if the possibility of such knowledge be granted, must be capable of translation into terms of mental states.

The primary interest of this school, both historically and constructively, is directed upon the analysis of the knowledge of an external world into constituents of sensation. So strong is this interest in sensation, an interest which has rightly earned for the school the designation of sensationalist, that one would almost suppose consciousness to be composed solely of a kaleidescopic succession of sensations. Sensations, in their temporal and spatial discreteness, their qualitative resemblances, and their associational connections, are at any rate taken as the type of mental facts. And it is this sensationalism on which Mill rests when he lays down the distinction between intuition and inference.

Yet sensations are not the only contents of the mind acknowledged by Mill. With reference to the other contents of the mind there are two conflicting tendencies: either, on the one hand, to reduce them all to mere given mental states of the same immediacy as sensation, in which case there is no opening for inferences to slip between them; or, on the other hand, to lift them to the level of various operations performed upon and with sensation, in which case inference finds a work to do but immediacy is gone.

There are several of these other classes of mental states recognized by Mill, and one or two factors that he does not think of classing as mental states, but which, if not so classified, do not fit into his original theory of consciousness. Beside sensations, he classes as mental states images, emotions, volitions, and thoughts. Relations he hesitates about so classing. Meanings he does not class here, and on this side of his system they are simply an outstanding factor. Some of these nonsensational mental facts require examination.

What we now call mental images constitute the simplest of the nonsensational mental states recognized by Mill. Mill usually calls them "ideas," as against sensations, which he also calls "impressions," after Hume.^ "Whenever any state of consciousness has once been excited in us, no matter by what cause, an inferior degree of the same state of consciousness, a state of consciousness resembling the former, but

' But of course he has other uses of the term "idea."

SUBJECTIVE FACTS AS DATA ii

inferior in intensity, is capable of being reproduced in us without the

presence of any such cause as excited it at first This law is

expressed by saying, in the language of Hume, that every mental impression has its idea."^ "These ideas, or secondary mental states, are excited by our impressions, or by other ideas, according to certain laws which are called Laws of Association."^ Here one might be tempted to see between primary and "secondary mental states" a distinction corresponding to that between intuition and inference, or immediate and mediate. But such a comparison would be entirely misleading. Impressions and ideas stand for Mill upon exactly the same level of immediacy. The distinction which he makes between them on the ground of the presence or absence of a stimulating object^ is from this point of view illegitimate, for it is not based on a difference in their actual analyzable content, but is itself an inference we draw from their organized relations. Again, the laws of association by which these secondary states are aroused by no means coincide with the inferential laws by which we pass from facts directly known to facts known through proof. The confusion of inference and association which sometimes does arise Mill expressly brands as a serious logical fallacy." Sensations and images, in short, are on the same level of immediacy, both directly given in consciousness. They are both mental fact. From this point of view we should have no right to treat memory and expectation as in any sense a means of rising inferentially above the immediate data of consciousness.

The other mental states which must be included in the immediate content of consciousness Mill classifies as thoughts, emotions, and volitions. These are taken exactly in the same way as sensation, all equally immediate. Emotions and volitions^ we may for our present purpose lay aside. But the mental states which he calls thoughts have grave significance for a theory of inference.

It is certainly disconcerting to find the class of "thoughts" included as a member of this list. Where is inference to come in if it is not thought? But thoughts too are taken as mere mental facts. "Under the word Thought is here to be included whatever we are internally conscious of when we are said to think."^ These "intellectual states of

'• 521-23, and elsewhere.

5 A volition indeed is made up of two things : a physical effect, preceded by a "state of mind"; the latter is the "intention to produce the effect," and that belongs to the content of consciousness (516).

12 RELATION OF INFERENCE TO FACT IN MILUS LOGIC

mind" are just as primitive and immediate facts as sensations, for Mill "recognizes no ultimate premises but \hQ facts of our subjective consciousness: our sensations, emotions, intellectual states of mind, and volitions."^ We are here confronted with a curious and most significant difficulty, which brings into question the whole doctrine of immediacy in Mill's sense. For certainly inferences, knowledge obtained by reasoning, not only what we see and feel but what we " fancy that we see or feel," are all in some sense "intellectual states of mind"; they are part of what "we are internally conscious of when we are said to think." Yet this thinking, which is surely to be set in contrast with the data of inference as the very process of inference if there is such a thing as inference at all, is in turn swept back into the contents of consciousness, all of which are immediately given as the data of inference. The immediacy of all mental states and the genuineness of inference are thus in flat contradiction.

In the next place, how does Mill treat relations ? Between facts of nature, taken in the objective sense that will come before us below. Mill recognizes the possibility of all sorts of relations; but these are all reducible to the subjective relations of coexistence, succession, and resemblance between mental states, and it is the latter that concern us here. Here we meet with the same ambiguity. Mill wavers between two positions. For these relations between objective facts are reduced subjectively either to relations between states of consciousness or to states of consciousness themselves. On the one hand, " those relations, when considered as subsisting between other things, exist in reality only between .... states of consciousness";^ on the other hand, "there is no part of what the names expressive of the objective relation imply that is not resolvable into states of consciousness."^ The peculiar significance of this ambiguity lies here, that only when these relations are taken as themselves states of consciousness can they be treated consistently with Mill's general theory of the subjective immediacy of consciousness; while only as they are treated as somehow different from states of consciousness, added to them, as it were, or involving reorganization of them, is there room for a process of inference that, while resting on immediate intuition, shall build upon it a structure of mediated knowledge. The ambiguity is indispensable to the seeming clearness of the original distinction between intuition and inference. So we find Mill asserting on the one side that "resemblance is nothing but our feeling of resemblance; succession is nothing but our feeling of succes-

' 5206 (italics mine).

* 65g (italics mine). ^ 60& (italics mine).

SUBJECTIVE FACTS AS DATA 13

sion'"^; and on the other side that "our consciousness of the succession of these sensations is not a third sensation or feeling added to them."^ Mill simply assumes that, because "to have two feeUngs at all implies having them either successively or else simultaneously," therefore successive sensations are somehow a sensation of succession; and so with the other relations. How this can be is well acknowledged to be a mystery. "These feelings of resemblance and .... dissimilarity are parts of our nature; .... states of consciousness which are peculiar, unresolvable, and inexplicable."^ They are "either .... states of feeling, or something inextricably involved therein."''

The final breakdown of this doctrine of immediacy of consciousness is disclosed when a system of meanings is set up over against the merely passing, given facts. But it will be convenient to postpone a discussion of Mill's system of meanings till after we have examined his attempt to build objective out of subjective facts. We may then be able to trace more clearly the root of Mill's difficulty. But it is already evident that there is a confusion in Mill's conception of given mental facts. Indeed, it appears to involve three distinct errors, perhaps all cardinal errors of the associational school:

First, all analyzed content of experience is made subjective. The una vowed motive for this is probably as follows: The strain of attention required to analyze any content of experience, and the temporary uncertainty as to the outcome of the analysis, are used as indications that the content when so analyzed is subjective.^ The effort, for example, to distinguish the baffling shades of green seen upon a meadow, or the evanescent chirps and hums heard in the same meadow, acts as a motive to refer back to subjective consciousness the colors and sounds when they are discriminated. In this way all phenomena when analyzed tend to become psychological, and experience is taken as composed of mental states.

Secondly, these subjective products of analysis are then regarded as genetically prior to the analysis which brought them to consciousness. Because they are now found there, it is supposed that they must previously have been there.*^ An experience which analytic attention has succeeded in differentiating into elements is taken as having been previously constructed by an association of similar elements. So the course

5 Mead, "The Definition of the Psychical," University of Chicago Decennial Publications, First Series, III, 23-38.

* Royce, Outlines of Psychology, 97-117, has an excellent discussion of this fallacy.

of experience becomes an agglomeration of original, subjective, internally j5xed units. This is sensationalism combined with associationism.

Thirdly, a succession of logically independent units is expected to constitute a single experience. Mental states as mere facts are wholly evanescent, and are never repeated. How then can there be any accumulation in the series ? At times Mill is fully aware of the difficulty, and acknowledges as inexplicable the power possessed by the series of mental states of knowing itself as a series.^ But this inexplicability never drives him back to a reconsideration of his first assumption. Leaving the mental facts in their bare givenness and independence, he naively adds to them an "impulse of the generalizing propensity."^ Now Mill is of course right in regarding generalization as most significant for the theory of inference. The whole possibility of inference to reach after and before rests on generalization. But the propensity to generalize is a somewhat startling addition to the scheme of simply associated mental states. Is it not in fact a contradiction? Given a succession of barely presented mental contents, one can suppose an addition of more such contents and more varied contents. But how could generalization get any foothold among them? What could generalization possibly mean in terms of such contents, even including immediate feelings of resemblance ? The truth is that Mill has assumed, side by side with his system of mental states, a system of universal meanings. Were it not for these, inference could be only the piling up of more intuitions. With them, inference finds expression in significant propositions. The mysterious propensity of the mind to generalize is simply the illicit acknowledgment, whenever they are needed, of a system of meanings which connect the bare, passing facts of consciousness and elevate them into an organic experience.

To recapitulate. Mill starts with a sharp distinction between immediate intuition and mediate inference. The distinction, however, breaks down, because if the given facts of consciousness are made to include all the contents of experience there is no room for inference, while if we allow an element of inference in some of the facts of consciousness any facts may be equally infected and no data are left whose immediacy can be guaranteed. Mill escapes the pressure of the difficulty only because his treatment of inference is disrupted into two parts: On the subjective level he assigns the locus of inference by asserting its distinction from intuition; but he does not on this level discuss the method of inference, and so escapes the need of a criterion of its distinction from intuition.

' Mill, Examination of Hamilton, I, 260-62. * 154^, 227a, b.

SUBJECTIVE FACTS AS DATA 15

On the objective level he elaborates a method of inference, but the immediate data upon which the method must operate he assumes as already provided on the subjective level. On the one level everything is datal, with no room for inference; on the other, there is a method of inference but no starting-point for its operation. This last assertion can receive its justification, however, only after an examination of Mill's treatment of objective facts, to which we may now turn.

Chapter II The World Of Objective Facts

The world of facts with which Mill's inferential process actually deals is a thoroughly objective world, conceived in terms of pure naturalism; not at all the world of subjective mental facts which he first assumed. When Mill is expounding its method it is these objective facts upon which inference is made to rest.

How does Mill reach this world of objective facts? Ostensibly he gets it by a process of complication of the associative connections of mental states. The complications become so involved that the original mental states drop out of sight and the complications alone remain, to form an objective world of things and events. It would be aside from our purpose to criticize this transition in detail, but we may note three fundamental characters of the objective world thus reached by Mill. A statement of these will make clearer the nature of the shift from a subjective to an objective level. It will then also be observed that they correspond closely to the three "analogies" of Kant.

In the first place, it is a world of things, existing permanently and independent of individual consciousness. The transition to this conception from that of mental states is effected by means of the conception of permanent potentialities of sensation.^ On the Berkeleyan level, where experience of objects is interpreted in psychological terms, sensible things are sensations, and the existence of sensible things means their perception by the mind. Nature is but the aggregate of sensible ideas, and the uniformity of nature is a uniformity in the order of sensations. Now Mill, as we have seen, starts on this level; but by means of complicating associations he rises to an objective level, on which the permanent potentialities of sensation serve as a core around which phenomena are organized.^ Substance is thus conceived as a fixed group or set of potentialities of sensation joined together according to a fixed law. These are not "mere vague possibilities," but "conditional certainties. "^ They are

' This transition is briefly described in the Logic, 53-54. The classical passage in which it is elaborated is in Examination of Hamilton, chap. xi. In both these works Mill uses the term "possibilities of sensation." In his later Essay on Berkeley he uses the more appropriate term "potentialities."

THE WORLD OF OBJECTIVE FACTS 17

considered objective because of their permanence, their rehability, and their social community. First, they are permanent. ''The conception I form of the world .... comprises, along with the sensations I am

feeling, a countless variety of possibiHties of sensation These

various possibilities are the important thing to me in the world. My present sensations are generally of little importance, and are, moreover, fugitive; the possibilities, on the contrary, are permanent, which is the character that mainly distinguishes our idea of Substance from our notion of sensation."' The object is "invested with the quality of permanence, in contrast .... with the temporary character of each of the sensations composing the group " ;^ it "presents itself to the mind . . . . as a kind of permanent substratum, under a set of passing experiences or manifestations." "The whole set of sensations as possible, form a permanent background to any one or more of them that are, at a given moment, actual."^ Secondly, they are reliable even when they pass outside the individual's experience.'' "The reliance of mankind on the real existence of ... . objects, means reUance on the reality and permanence of Possibilities of ... . sensations, when no such sensations are actually experienced. "s "Our sensations we carry with us wherever we go, and they never exist where we are not; but when we change our place we do not carry away with us the Permanent Possibilities of Sensation; they remain until we return, or arise and cease under conditions with which our presence has in general nothing to do."^ Thirdly, they are socially common. For " more than all .... they are, and will be after we have ceased to feel, Permanent Possibilities of Sensation to other beings than ourselves." "The permanent possibilities are common to us and to our fellow-creatures: the actual sensations are not." "The world of Possible Sensations succeeding one another according to laws is as much in other beings as it is in me," "it has therefore an existence outside of me; it is an External World." "This puts the final seal to our conception of the groups of possibilities as the fundamental reality in Nature."^ For such reasons as these "our actual sensations and the permanent possibilities of sensation, stand out in obtrusive contrast to one another"; and "the possibilities .... come to be looked upon as much more real than the actual sensation; nay, as the very realities of which these are only the ... . appearances."*

' Mill, Hamilton, 239. s Mill, Hamilton, 244. ' Mill, Hamilton, 242.

l8 RELATION OF INFERENCE TO FACT IN MILL'S LOGIC

These groupings in nature, then, no longer subsist for Mill immediately between mental states as such, but are composed of mental states only remotely or indirectly. When we once get them we forget their associational origin and treat them in an entirely naturalistic fashion.

In the second place, the relation of cause and effect holds, not of sensations directly, but of these objects. Precisely as substances are lifted from groups of sensations to an objective level, so causal connections between these substances come to replace mere associations between sensations.^ "In addition to fixed groups, we also recognize a fixed

Order in our sensation Now, of what nature is this fixed order

among our sensations ? It is a constancy of antecedence and sequence. But the constant antecedence and sequence do not generally exist between

one actual sensation and another In almost all the constant

sequences which occur in Nature, the antecedence and consequence do not obtain between sensations, but between the groups we have been speaking about, of which a very small portion is actual sensation, the greater part being permanent possibilities of sensation. Hence, our ideas of causation .... become connected, not with .... our sensations as actual at all, .... but with groups of possibiHties of sensation."=^

When this conception of causal laws has been obtained it is supposed to be carried to the farthest limit of generalization, and is treated as an absolute character of the objective world. Every event takes place according to a fixed law of sequence, and the whole universe is lawabiding. Mill attempts to deduce this causal character of the whole course of the universe, somewhat as he did its independent existence, by a complication of subjective association ;3 but here even more obviously than there he must leap to another level before there is any place for the

^ Mill, Berkeley, 288.

^ Mill, Hamilton, 239-40. There is much confusion in Mill as to the place of sensation in the causal scheme. Objective things, as potentialities of sensation, apparently include all actual sensations as that part of their content which happens to be experienced. If so, how can sensations be given a place as distinct links in the causal series ? This is to duplicate them. This is similar to the difiSculty in Kant of referring sensations to things in themselves as causes of the sensations, although causation is properly a category only of the phenomenal world, which consists of objectively organized sensations. This confusion in Mill suggests the difficulty found by neo-realists in assigning to consciousness a place in the realistic scheme. The following passages in Mill's Logic may be consulted in this connection (46a, 4q&, 51a, 52e, 576, 636-643, 81&, 82c, 2426, 4516, 589^-900).

' 397-405-

THE WORLD OF OBJECTIVE FACTS 19

conception of objective things and laws. Ostensibly a generalization from particular causal connections, it is taken as an absolute assumption by which each of them may be tested.

That the two characters of the objective world already referred to are really assumptions independent of the subjective basis on which they are ostensibly grounded becomes all the more evident when we consider its third character, which is in a sense the limit to which the other two in combination are pushed. For, in the third place, Nature is taken as a single, unitary whole; its objects, through the interaction of their properties, forming a completely interrelated system, whose operations are absolutely determined. "The state of the whole universe at any instant we believe to be the consequence of its state at the previous instant; insomuch that one who knew all the agents which exist at the present moment, their collocation in space, and all their properties, .... could predict the whole subsequent history of the universe." "The whole series of events in the history of the universe, past and future, is ... . capable, in its own nature, of being constructed a priori by anyone whom we can suppose acquainted with the original distribution of all natural agents, and with the whole of their properties."' How remote is such a universe from an accidental agglomeration of given mental states! Mill has certainly passed here completely to an objective and universal level.