On John Stuart Mill’s Philosophy Of Science

John Stuart Mill is one of the founders of the nineteenth Century philosophy of science, his philosophy of science is mainly embodied in the masterpiece of "A System of Logic". However, his contribution to the philosophy of science has not received due attention and in-depth study. In Mill’s view, the representation of knowledge is propositions or judgments; knowledge comes from sensory experience; knowledge can be obtained by intuition and inference, that inductive method, deductive method and hypothesis method are the main methods for inference; knowledge needs language to express, the analysis of language is the analysis of the name, the proposition and definition. Mill’s philosophy of science has rationality and limitations. Its rationality is that the scientific experiment method as the center of Mill’s philosophy of science theory plays an important role in science; his understanding of knowledge, language analysis and the view of hypothesis’s function are worth affirmation. Its limitations are mainly manifested, that Mill exaggerated the role of induction but distorted deduction; his standing on empiricism brings many problems in the theory of knowledge; his "Uniform Law of nature" has loopholes.