Abstract

John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843) is often considered to be a work that defends an inductivist epistemology. In this article, I propose to question this status by examining the definition of induction set out in Mill’s book, and the consequences that can be deduced from it. I show that Mill’s inductivism implies a methodology of scientific research in which deductive reasoning is just as important, if not more important, than inductive methods, so that the classical opposition between induction and deduction is transformed into a complementarity. I then show how the concepts of natural law and causality emerge from these discussions, and examine how well the methods proposed by Mill are able to account for subsequent scientific discoveries.