Editing John Stuart Mill (section)

===''A System of Logic''===
{{Main|A System of Logic}}
Mill joined the debate over the [[scientific method]] which followed on from [[John Herschel]]'s 1830 publication of ''A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy'', which incorporated [[inductive reasoning]] from the known to the unknown, discovering general laws in specific facts and verifying these laws empirically. [[William Whewell]] expanded on this in his 1837 ''History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time'', followed in 1840 by ''The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon their History'', presenting induction as the mind superimposing concepts on facts. Laws were [[self-evident]] truths, which could be known without need for empirical verification.

Mill countered this in 1843 in ''[[A System of Logic]]'' (fully titled ''A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation''). In "[[Mill's Methods]]" (of induction), as in Herschel's, laws were discovered through observation and induction, and required empirical verification.<ref name="Shermer2002">{{cite book |first=Michael |last=Shermer |author-link=Michael Shermer |title=In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace: A Biographical Study on the Psychology of History |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eu9Uu3PbdcgC&pg=PP212 |date=15 August 2002 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0199923854 |page=212}}</ref> Matilal remarks that [[Dignāga]] analysis is much like John Stuart Mill's Joint Method of Agreement and Difference, which is inductive. He suggested that it was very likely that during his stay in India he came across the tradition of logic, in which scholars started taking interest after 1824, though it is unknown whether it influenced his work.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Matilal |first1=Bimal K. |last2=Chakrabarti |first2=A. |title=Knowing from Words: Western and Indian Philosophical Analysis of Understanding and Testimony |date=1994 |publisher=Springer Science & Business Media |isbn=978-0-7923-2345-7 |oclc=28016267 }}{{page needed|date=March 2023}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Matilal |first1=Bimal K. |date=March 1989 |title=Nyāya critique of the Buddhist doctrine of non-soul |journal=Journal of Indian Philosophy |volume=17 |issue=1 |doi=10.1007/bf00160139 |s2cid=170181380}}</ref>