John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
British philosopher, economist, and logician. Author of A System of Logic (1843), the founding text of the composition-of-causes doctrine from which emergence theory descends. 1
Key Contribution: Homopathic vs. Heteropathic Laws
In A System of Logic, Book III, Mill distinguished two modes in which causes combine:
- Homopathic (composition of causes): the joint effect of several causes is simply the sum of the effects each would produce alone — vector addition of causes. Paradigm: mechanics, where forces compose linearly.
- Heteropathic: when components combine in certain ways, the resulting phenomena obey laws that are not obtainable by simply aggregating the laws governing the components. Paradigm: chemistry, where the properties of a compound (e.g., water) are not the sum of the properties of its elements (hydrogen, oxygen).
Mill’s chemical example — the heteropathic law case — is the direct ancestor of the concept of emergence. He called such laws “chemical laws” precisely because chemistry was his paradigm of non-aggregative combination. 1
Context
- G. H. Lewes (1875) later coined the word “emergent” for Mill’s heteropathic effects, contrasted with “resultant” (homopathic) ones
- cd-broad formalized the position into the classical emergentism of the 1920s
- The modern formal analogue of non-aggregativity is nonlinearity: when F(A₁…Aₙ, R, D, E) is not decomposable into a sum of the Aᵢ’s intrinsic properties
Relationship to This Wiki
- Origin of the aggregation question at the heart of emergence
- His composition-of-causes distinction underwrites the non-aggregativity criterion on emergence (“the whole is more than the sum of the parts” made precise)
- His inductivist methodology belongs to the same tradition as the wiki’s treatment of reasoning-methods and Mill’s methods of induction
See Also
- emergence — The concept descending from his heteropathic laws
- cd-broad — His principal philosophical heir
- samuel-alexander — Later classical emergentist
References
- Mill, J. S. (1843). A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. London: John W. Parker. Book III, ch. 6 (“Of the Composition of Causes”) and ch. 10.
- O’Connor, T. & Wong, H. Y. — “Emergent Properties”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1