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|Brief=a 19th century British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. His writings on scientific change cover topics ranging from the nature of scientific reasoning to theory-ladenness and scientific progress
|Summary=Although Mill's writings primarily covered topics unrelated to science and scientific change, he was a passionate interlocutor in the mid-19th century debates on science. Developing his notions mostly as a response to other philosophers, Mill wrote on the primacy of induction in scientific reasoning, advocated for the use of logic in scientific justification instead of the study of history, and construed science as being a part of the greater social context. His principal work on these ideas is presented in his 1843 book "A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive".
|Historical Context=Mill was an active participant in the debates surrounding epistemology of science in the mid-19th century. In order to properly contextualize Mill’s his contributions, it is important to understand some of the major ideas that preceded him, and the most topical issues of his day.
One of the most prominent ideas that many philosophers prior to and during Mill’s time believed in was the ‘uniformity of nature.’ This concept was usually the uncritical starting assumption of many philosophers, including Mill himself. The principle of the ‘uniformity of nature’ states that the natural phenomenon behaves in a uniform, law-like fashion. The universe was thought to be governed by general laws that were considered immutable. This idea is also sometimes characterized as the ‘law of causation’--- “it is a law that there is a law for everything”.[[CiteRef::Buchdahl (1971)|p.348]]
