John Stuart Mill, John Herschel, and the 'Probability of Causes'

Author(s): John V. Strong

Reviewed work(s):
Source: PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association,
Vol. 1978, Volume One: Contributed Papers (1978), pp. 31-41
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John Stuart Mill, John Herschel,
and the 'Probability of Causes'
John V. Strong
Boston College
1. Introduction
Any discussion of probability theory in
early nineteenth-century Bri-
tain requires a specially vigorous exercise of the historical imagination.
A century of subsequent thought about the foundations of the subject has
made both historians and philosophers of science only too aware of howi
elusive and polyvalent a term 'probability' is; indeed, since Carnap, it
has scarcely been possible to use the word without a qualifying adjective
or subscript. Before the nineteenth
century, on the other
hand, during
the 'emergence' of formalized probabilistic thinking, writers from Pascal
and Fermat onwards were keenly conscious that the
concept they used was
often ill-defined and equivocally employed.
There is a sensation, therefore, of sailing unexpectedly into a patch
of flat calm when one turns to such early Victorian writers (I use the
term in its common, extended sense to refer to the period from around 1830
till the middle of the century) as Lubbock, Drinkwater-Bethune, Galloway,
and, above all, De Morgan.2 For them, probability is Laplace's Essai phil-
osophigue [16] and Th4orie
analytique [17] with such semi-popularized pre-
sentations of Laplace's ideas as Lacroix's Traite e"lementaire [15] and
the writings of Quetelet ([23 ]; [24 ], English translation [25 ]). Even a
mathematician of the stature of De Morgan devotes virtually all his ef-
forts in this field to making Laplace's results accessible to English-
speaking readers.
Given the state of British mathematics during these years, this is not
too surprising. Only a short while had passed since the subject had been
wakened from its slumbers by the labors of the Young Turks of the Cambridge
'Analytical Society': John Herschel, George Peacock, Charles Babbage and
their contemporaries. Much of the best British mathematics was still an
import from the Continent (and indeed the early efforts of the Cambridge
group had gone largely into translating standard French treatises). In
PSA 1978, Volume 1, pp. 31-41
Copyright ( 1978 by the Philosophy of Science Association.
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32
probability theory (as in celestial mechanics), Laplace towered over his
peers, and hence the obvious task for the British innovators was the ex-
position and dissemination of his ideas and, as their confidence grew,
the further development and application of them. Both precedent (in the
form of Laplace's own works, as well as those of earlier writers like Con-
dorcet3), and acquiescence in Laplace's serene assurance that the theory
as a whole was no more than "good sense reduced to calculation," encour-
aged such steps; after all, who would be so perverse as to insist that
his field of interest required no common sense?
At this point events took a turn of a kind familiar in the history of
ideas. Just as in the seventeenth century a much-simplified version of
the philosophy of Bacon's Novum organum was adopted as 'Baconianism',
and just as doctrines about nature and scientific method far less nu-
anced than Newton's own views became the 'Newtonianism' of the Enlighten-
ment; so Laplace's richly ambivalent view of the subject matter of the 'doc
trine of chances' became, in the nineteenth century, a much more univocal
'Laplacean' interpretation of probability. "Chance," says De Morgan in an
early essay, "is merely an expression of our ignorance of the chain of
events which have led to any particular occurrence."([7], p. 103). In
modern parlance, probabilities are rational degrees of belief, and any
question of probability is simply "an inquiry into the number of ways in
which, under given conditions, an event may happen or fail"; when these
are enumerated "the proportion of these two is that of the probabilities
for and against."(ibid.). The ground is thus laid for a critic dissatis-
fied with the received interpretation of Laplace's ideas, to question whe-
ther Laplace himself was a 'Laplacean' in this sense; and as we shall see,
this is in fact what happens.
When these criticisms did develop they were (as might be anticipated)
directed against both the presuppositions of the Laplacean doctrine and its
applications. That some objections were based simply upon misconceptions
or bias is clear from the fact that writers like De Morgan took pains on
repeated occasions (see [7], [8], [9]) to insist that the theory was nei-
ther irreligious nor an inducement to gambling! Other criticisms were
aimed chiefly at the applications of the theory: for instance, whether in
particular cases like the calculations of Condorcet on judicial verdicts,
the mathematics had not run away from its users, giving impressively pre-
cise but totally unrealistic conclusions.4 One line of criticism, though--
that which challenged the legitimacy of the so-called 'inverse' use of the
probability calculus to estimate which of several causes, each capable of
producing an observed effect, had in fact done so--bore much more directly
on the fundamental assumptions of the Laplacean interpretation. As I have
argued elsewhere [29] , the attacks of George Boole (most notably in his
The Laws of Thought [4]) and of John Venn (in
The Logic
of Chance [31])
drastically undermined the whole project of merging degree-of-belief
ac-
counts of probability with the method of hypothesis, to produce a probabil-
istic logic of scientific inference. Indeed, after the appearance in 1874
of that curiously anachronistic work, Jevons' The Principles of Science
[13] , such efforts were almost entirely abandoned for nearly half a cen-
tury, until revived (in a variety
of very different guises) by Keynes [14],
Reichenbach [27], Ramsey [26], and Carnap [63.5
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33
Though a really adequate account of the developments noted in the last
paragraph has yet to be written, the major events, and the identities of
the principal contributors, seem well enough established.6 What I should
like to argue here is that, even as a crude sketch, the picture I have
drawn is flawed, omitting as it does (and as does every discussion of
the topic of which I am aware), one of the most interesting treatments of
probability, both 'pure' and applied, to be found in the nineteenth cen-
tury. I refer to the following root-and-branch attack on Laplace, which
begins with this gloss on the initial definition of probability found in
the Essai philosophique:
If his [i.e., Laplace's] unrivaled command over the means which
mathematics supply for calculating the results of given data,
necessarily implied an equally sure judgment of what the data
ought to be, I should hardly dare give utterance to my conviction,
that in this opinion he is entirely wrong; that his foundation is
altogether insufficient for the superstructure erected upon it;
and that there is implied, in all rational calculation of the prob-
abilities of events, an essential condition, which is either over-
looked in Laplace's statement, or so vaguely indicated as neither
to be suggested to the reader, nor kept in view by the writer him-
self. ([21], pp. 1140-1141).
The author of this passage is John Stuart Mill; the book is the System
of Logic. But these views were likely not familiar to many of Mill's con-
temporaries, since they appeared only in the first (1843) edition of the
Logic, being replaced in all editions from 1846 onwards with what was (or
could at least easily be read as) a much more sympathetic appreciation of
the standard 'Laplacean' account of probability. What I would like to do
in the remainder of this paper, after describing briefly Mill's position
in the first edition of the Logic (hereafter SLI), is suggest some answers
to the following questions: (1) Why is Mill talking about probability at
all in the Logic? (2) What is the source of his initial, very negative
views on the received interpretation? (3) Why did these views alter so
markedly in the interval between 1843 and 1846? and (4) What was his final
position on the matter? Finally, I shall indicate why the whole subject
seems to me not only interesting in itself, but also significant for under-
standing how British philosophy in the nineteenth century tried to come to
grips with the alluring but recalcitrant 'doctrine of chances
2. Probability and the Structure of the System of Logic
For those accustomed to think of the relationship between probability
and scientific inference in twentieth-century terms, the fact that Mill
devotes three chapters of the System of Logic (in all editions) to the sub-
ject of probability may come as a surprise. Unlike, say, Jevons, Mill al-
lows only a minor and subsidiary role to hypotheses in science. For Mill,
scientific explanation is, broadly speaking, subsumption under causal laws,
with the latter interpreted as invariable sequences of phenomena ([21], pp.
323-369); the logic of hypotheses is a set of procedures for eliminating
all but one candidate among a set of laws, all of which purport to cover
the same phenomena.
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34
Probability does find a natural place in Mill's discussion, however.
Central to Mill's treatment of causality (and hence to the argument of
the Logic as a whole) is the doctrine of the plurality of causes
([21],
pp. 434-453). Events are commonly the effect of an intersection of
causal chains, of a 'collocation' of causes. In order to find if there
is in any given case a deeper order underlying such collocations, we re-
quire means for deciding whether observed regularities among phenomena
are in fact mere coincidences, or whether they betray the presence of
hitherto unsuspected causes at work.
Now this is an issue which had already been raised by several genera-
tions of writers. Originally discussed in connection with a kind of ar-
gument to design in the early eighteenth century by John Arbuthnot (see
[11], pp. 166ff.), it emerged in a full-blown, secularized form in a 1735
essay by Daniel Bernoulli on the origin of the solar system ([3]; cf.
r30], pp. 222-224). The question, used as an illustration by virtually
every writer on probability for the next hundred and fifty years, was this:
given the fact that all the known planets revolve in the same sense about
the sun, and that their orbits all lie more or less in a plane, it seems
sensible to ask whether the observed order could have arisen simply by co-
incidence, rather than from some single cause. In other words, prior to
theorizing about the mechanism which might account for the regularity,
one ought first to ask whether there need be any mechanism.
This question about the 'probability of causes'--in Mill's language,
the problem of "how to distinguish coincidences which are casual from
those which are the result of law" ([211, p. 1148)--is clearly crucial to
any account of scientific explanation of the sort Mill proposes. And in
fact Mill accepts the validity of the calculation done by Daniel Bernoulli
(and, following him in essentials, by Laplace). What Mill objects to strong
ly in
ELa
is the implication that somehow such an assessment of probabili-
ties can go beyond what is given in experience; "that there can be a mea-
surement of probability where there is no experience."( [21], p. 1143).
For Mill, Laplacean probability calculations are valid so far, but only so
far, as their foundations are empirical: "Conclusions respecting the prob-
ability of a fact rest not upon a different, but upon the very same basis,
as conclusions respecting its certainty; namely, not our ignorance, but
our knowledge: knowledge obtained by experience, of the proportion between
the cases in which the fact occurs, and those in which it does not occur.
Every calculation of chances is grounded upon an induction..." ([21], p.
1142; emphasis added). It seems quite clear from this passage (and
the
impression is further strengthened when it is taken in context) that Mill
is arguing for a frequency interpretation of probability, almost a quarter
century before Venn. I think the likeliest reason for this, and for Mill's
stand against the near-unanimous acceptance of Laplaceanism by his contempo-
raries, is implicit
in what has already been said about the depth of his
empiricist commitments (though 'empiricism' was not for him an attractive
label). The received version of probability smacked too much of apriorism,
of a device whereby truths about the world could be spun out of the human
mind without observation or experiment, and "by a system
of
operations upon
numbers, our ignorance...coined
into a science."(ibid.).8
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35
Nonetheless, I would like to suggest one source of influence on Mill's
ideas that may have been of significance. The writer to whom Mill seems
to have turned most regularly for methodological inspiration is the Scot-
tish Common Sense philosopher Dugald Stewart.9 Stewart has relatively
little to say on probability, but he does devote one long note to the sub-
ject in his Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man (1828). A
large part of this note is given over to quotations from a paper of Pre-
vost and L'Huillier (1796)--characterized by Stewart as "very able"-- in
which the authors assert that our judgments about 'Laplacean' probabili-
ties, and those about observed causal regularities among natural events,
"dependent de deux ordres de facultes differents": in particular, that
the latter rely wholly on "la liason des idees'"lfound in our experience
([28], VII, pp. 116-118). Given the paucity of criticism of the founda-
tions of probability prior to Mill's time, and the accessibility of this
passage to Mill while he was writing the Logic, the arguments of Prevost
and L'Huillier could have supported, even if they did not inspire, Mill's
misgivings about the Laplacean view.10
3. Herschel, Mill, and the Second Edition of the System of Logic (1846)
If the above account is even roughly correct, especially in its empha-
sis on the ease with which a non-Laplacean, frequency interpretation of
probability finds a place in Mill's philosophy of science, it becomes all
the more surprising to find him apparently turning away sharply from this
interpretation only three years later, in the 1846 edition of the Logic
(?P2).
"The
theory
of
chances,"
he writes
there,
"as conceived
by Laplace
and by mathematicians generally, has not the fundamental fallacy which I
had ascribed to it."([211, p. 535). And on another point on which he had
taken issue with Laplace in
SLI
(the rules for estimating the credibility
of witnesses testifying to the occurrence of an improbable coincidence),
Mill now writes, "This argument of Laplace's, though I formerly thought
it fallacious, is irrefragable in the case which he supposes..." ([21],
p. 636).
Fortunately for the historian, it is possible to trace in great detail
the stages in Mill's change of heart.ll There is abundant evidence that,
for a writer preparing a treatise of unprecedented scope on the 'methods
of scientific investigation' (as the subtitle of the Logic ran), Mill
knew painfully little about the natural sciences of his day.12 Even after
the publication of
?L1,
he was conscious that the book might well contain
errors or omissions that he had been unable to detect; and accordingly,
when Sir John Herschel wrote a cordial letter of thanks for a presentation
copy of the Logic which Mill had sent him, the latter made bold to ask if
Herschel would suggest any corrections that seemed necessary.13
The choice of critic was a shrewd one. If Mill knew surprisingly lit-
tle science, Herschel had mastered an astonishingly large amount. (His on-
ly rival would have been William Whewell, with whose Philosophy
of the In-
ductive Sciences Mill had dealt quite sharply in the Logic.) Even more im-
pressive than Herschel's accomplishments was his reputation; as one recent
commentator has put it, for the early Victorians, to be scientific was to
be as much like Herschel as possible ([5], p. 219). Though five years re-
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36
turned from his epochal survey of the southern skies at the Cape of Good
Hope, Herschel was still deep in the monumental task of preparing his ob-
servations for publication; but he readily turned his attention to the
Logic when Mill began serious work on a new edition in 1845. In December
of that year, Herschel sent a long letter to Mill, detailing his objec-
tions to Mill's strictures against Laplace's statement of the theory of
probabilities, as presented in SL1. "With these objections I can no ways
agree," he wrote, "and I will not conceal from you that I read them with
great concern and an earnest wish that you would give them a full recon-
sideration."14 Granted, says Herschel, that Laplace shares the tendency
of many mathematicians sometimes "to prefer mathematical calculation by
rule and formula to the plain exercise of common sense." But this is no
more than a lapse on Laplace's part. Mill's criticism misses the point
that Laplace was aware that only through experience could the formal cal-
culus of probabilities--which is, as Herschel notes, "simply the theory of
combinations"--be linked with the real world. Probability is, to be sure,
epistemic, "a matter of opinion & judgment" that certain events are equal-
ly possible "as regards our limited knowledge or conceptions." But the
basis of all such assessments is experience, whether in the form of the di-
rect evaluation of relative frequencies, or of more generalized and tacit
use of observation and experiment. "How do we know," asks Herschel, "that
in a forest of trees half of which are oaks it is equally possible to stum-
ble on an oak and another tree? Has anybody ever tried it?" And yet such
a judgment is in no sense a priori: "A total absence of all knowledge of
the connexion of events--or so to speak, of the mechanism of the events
is incompatible with that state of mind which leads us to assert an equal
probability... .We must see enough of the case to get or make for ourselves
an impression (perhaps an erroneous one) that there does exist a similarity
of circumstances. In short an opinion or a judgment to be worth the name
must be grounded on something not merely negative."
The 1846 revision of the Logic incorporates all these criticisms. After
summarizing his original view (with an amplified quotation from Laplace's
Essai to open the chapter), Mill devotes several pages to a detailed recan-
tation of his position in
SLI. Probability is indeed "probability to us,"
that is, the warranted degree of expectation we have that an event will
occur ([21], p. 535). This degree of expectation can be calculated by the
"common theory" of probability even in those cases in which we are unable
to appeal to any "special experience"; under such conditions,
the "logical
ground of the process [of calculation] is our knowledge, such knowledge as
we then have, of the laws governing the frequency of occurrence of the dif-
ferent cases; but in this case our knowledge is limited to that which, being
universal and axiomatic, does not require reference to specific experience,
or to any considerations arising out of the special nature of the
problem
under discussion."([21], p. 537).
4. Conclusion
It is clear that one wants to ask at least two questions about Mill's
revised estimate of the Laplacean (or perhaps Laplacean-Herschelian)
ac-
count of probability: is it fairer to Laplace's own views, and is it a
valid interpretation of the doctrine of chances in its own right?
The
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37
answer to the first question is surely yes, since only
SL2 brings out the
centrality of the epistemic interpretation of probability, and of the con-
cept of equipossibility, in the Essai. But precisely insofar as it does
capture Laplace's thought, the revised version of Mill's presentation
likewise reflects the deep double-mindedness of the Essai about these con-
cepts. Are possibilities attributes of things (and hence the objects of
empirical investigation like other physical properties)? Or do they rather
refer, like probabilities, "in part to our ignorance, in part to our know-
ledge"? And if probabilities are to be defined in terms of (equi-)possi-
bilities, can either interpretation leave us any the wiser about the true
nature of probability?
As can often happen, Mill was brought round by good advice to a position
that was soberer, better-balanced, and considerably less interesting than
his initial stance. But his original rejection of Laplace was not without
its sequel. Twenty years after the second edition of Mill's System of Lo-
gic appeared, John Venn published the first thorough-going frequentist trea-
tise on probability, The Logic of Chance [31] . "You seem to go farther
in rejecting the doctrines of the mathematicians than even I do," Mill
wrote in a thank-you letter to Venn when the latter sent him a copy of the
work as a gift ([20], pp. 1360-1361). Mill's particular problem, and in-
deed the whole tradition of the probability of causes, was by that time
well on its way to being taken up, transformed, and in a very short time
dissolved altogether, to become an intriguing but minor episode in the his-
tory of statistics. The underlying issues about the nature of probability
which Mill and Herschel had raised and then skirted round, on the other
hand, had as we know a very different fate; left pretty much as they were
found, they were passed along as a perplexing legacy to the philosophy of
science of our own time.
Notes
1I wish to thank Larry Laudan for his continuing advice and encourage-
ment in the larger research project of which this essay forms a part. I
am also grateful to the library staff at The Royal Society, London, for
their kind assistance in examining the Herschel Papers deposited there.
2For these writers, see John Herschel's review of Quetelet [23] and [24],
reprinted in [12].
3Todhunter gives an unsympathetic account of such applications, especial-
ly those proposed by Condorcet, in [30]. A very full treatment of the
background to Condorcet's ideas may be found in [1], pp. 225-244.
4This tradition was still very much alive in Laplace's time; see the
chapter on the 'probability of testimonies' in the 1820 edition of the
Essai ([16], pp. 109-125).
5For an introduction to Jevons' thought, see the chapter on him by E.H.
Madden in Blake et al. [2].
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6In America the project was going forward, in a quite different form, in
the work of C.S. Peirce.
7Mill's criticisms in SL1 may thus antedate those of Robert Leslie El-
lis, whose brief, -difficult papers in the Transactions of the Cambridge
Philosophical Society for 1843 and 1856 also argued for the frequency
interpretation.
8Hacking ([10],[11]) has shown that Laplace's views uneasily embrace
both degree-of-belief and relative-frequency accounts of probability,
and that this duality can be traced back to the writings of James Bernoul-
li and Leibniz on the subject.
9See Olson ([22], esp. pp. 94-124) for an extensive discussion of Stew-
art's views and of their influence on Victorian philosophy of science.
1OThe importance of this Continental tradition for the overall develop-
ment of methodology in Britain has been stressed in a recent paper by Lau-
dan [18 ]
llThis process has been noted by J.M. Rob-,on in his "Textual Introduction
to [21]; see esp. pp. lxxx-lxxxi.
12Mill was engagingly aware of his limitations in this regard, as his re-
marks on the matter in his Autobiography ([19], pp. 133-134) testify.
13Although I have concentrated here on what seem to me to be the chief
points of Herschel's criticisms regarding Mill's views on probability,
Herschel also provided a number of corrections on other topics; see Mill's
letter to Herschel of 28 February 1846 ([20], p. 695).
14Herschel to Mill, 22 December 1845; manuscript (apparently a fair copy
byr an amanuensis) at the Royal Society, London. I am grateful for permis-
sion to quote from this letter, to which the Society holds copyright.
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