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Another issue in Mill’s day pertained to the justification being necessarily true, as opposed to being true only contingently. Philosophers such as Kant and Whewell, who was heavily influenced by Kant’s work, were deductive necessitarians: they held that deductive reasoning is necessarily true, meaning that the conclusion of a deductive argument is universal and necessary. Contrarily, for them, inductive reasoning lead to conclusions that were inevitably fallible, showing that Whewell and Kant were critically aware of Hume’s problem. Deviating from Whewell, Mill’s empiricism favors inductive reasoning. Although Mill employs terminology such as “invariable” and “unconditionality” when describing logic of scientific justification, he is not a necessitarian as he lived in a post-Humean context. There is ongoing debate to this day whether Mill’s notions can ultimately be reduced to ones requiring a ‘necessary connection.’ If so, Mill would be rendered an inductive necessitarian [[CiteRef::Buchdahl (1971)]].
|Major Contributions====Mill’s Empiricism===
Mill is an empiricist who believes that all our ideas are gained through sense perception. Departing from the rationalist doctrines, which hold reason as the primary source of knowledge, Mill follows a long line of British empiricists such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume. The ‘source’ of ideas primarily refers to where the ideas come from, as opposed to denying the role that reason plays. As such, Mill holds that the mind is furnished with ideas through experience, and ''then '' reason can use these ideas. His empiricism is thoroughgoing: there is no source other than experience and observation that provides us with our ideas [[CiteRef::Macleod (2016)]]. His empiricism is quite radical: in fact, it is phenomenalistic. Drawing upon the works of earlier empiricist idealists such as Berkeley, Mill thinks that the mind-dependent reality is all we have access to. That is, there is nothing other than the ideas provided by sensations that the mind has access to. Unlike some earlier empiricists like Locke, Mill thinks that the external objects (if any) are not perceivable. Whereas Locke believed that the object’s objects' primary qualities and the ideas invoked by them resemble each other, Mill is more prudent in arguing that the only thing we can perceive is “a set of appearances” [[CiteRef::Mill (1974b)]]. Mill’s position that we cannot know anything about how things are in-themselves, but only know how they appear to us is called the “Relativity of Human Knowledge” [[CiteRef::Mill (1979)]].
Believing that experience and observation provide us with all knowledge, Mill rejects all forms of ''a priori '' knowledge: the doctrine that we can have knowledge that is independent of experience [[CiteRef::Macleod (2016)]]. Indeed, this departure is a response to Whewell, and more broadly to Kant, who believed that ''a priori '' knowledge are necessary pre-conditions of the mind that enable experience [[CiteRef::Losee (1983)]]. Not only does he reject that knowledge of extension, substance and place as ''a priori'', Mill instead argues that this type of seemingly ''a priori '' knowledge is “put together out of ideas of sensation” [[CiteRef::Macleod (2016)]][[CiteRef::Mill (1979)]]. In essence, all of our knowledge, including knowledge that is traditionally thought of as ''a priori'', originates from and is dependent on experience.
===Against the History of Science===
