An Introduction to Critical Thinking and Creativity - always yours

CHAPTER 14
MILL'S METHODS
In science and everyday life, we think a lot about causes and effects. Knowledge
about causation allows us to understand the world, make predictions, and change
things. In this chapter and the next one we shall discuss some of the principles
of causal reasoning. First we start with a set of rules known as "Mill's methods."
They were formulated by the famous English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-
1873), who wrote on a wide range of topics from logic and language to political
philosophy. When we have an observed effect E, we can use Mill's methods to
find its cause by following this procedure:
1. Identify a set of candidate causes— events or conditions that happened before
E, and one of them is suspected to be the cause of E.
2. Collect information about a range of situations involving these candidate
causes, and determine whether E occurred afterward in these situations.
3. Based on the information collected, use one of the five rules below to infer
the cause of E.
Let us now look at the five rules one by one and see how they are applied.
An Introduction to Critical Thinking and Creativity: Think More, Think Better. By Joe Y.F. Lau 125
Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.