A Preliminary Study On Mill’s Thoughts On Proposition

Proposition is a significant term in logic. Logicians have been concerned with the proposition problem since Aristotle first introduce this concept and gave it an exposition. Mill is one of them and he added some new ideas to the researches of former logicians and thus formed his particular thoughts about proposition. This paper is concentrated on Mill’s concepts and opinions on proposition, which are about to be summarized and then gives a brief remark and a preliminary rethinking. It is divided into four parts of this thesis.In the first part, it focuses on the characteristics of Mill’s logic thoughts as follows: Mill’s syncretic understanding to the logic connotation; experience causal feature of its inductive theory; cognitive characteristics and application characteristics of its logical thought. The first feature help us overall understand the logic of Mill; for the second and third features will help us to understand the detailed interpretation of content of Mill’s logic thought; the understanding for fourth characteristic will help us grasp the connections between Mill’s logic theory and his political economy theory.In the second part, the main content of Mill’s name theory are demonstrated elaborately. On the one hand, It discuss the reason that Mill took the analysis of name as the logical base point of his proposition theory; on the other hand, it discuss the content of the theory on the name. He gave name analysis as prior researching for three reasons: first, Mill paid attention to handle the relations of linguistics and logic; Second, the name should have clear reference, using name to express things itself rather than ideas about things; Third, the name is the proposition’s composition.The third part discusses the main content of his proposition theory, which is the core part of the full text. First of all, Mill made a distinction between judge and proposition, and claimed which kind of proposition he discussed in the thesis; Secondly, Mill defined the essence of the proposition and put forward two kinds of construct proposition methods; Furthermore, most of the proposition assert the content which is contained in the five kinds of relationships; Next, he take whether proposition have information as proposition classified standard; Finally, from the nature and the categorization of the proposition, it comes to a connection between Mill’s proposition theory and contemporary cognitive view of proposition.The fourth part mainly revolves around Mill’s proposition theory, which has influence on the today’s ideas on proposition. First of all, the write make overall evaluation on mill proposition thought; Then,the write compare his proposition theory with Frege’s proposition theory and Russell’s; Finally, on this basis, it expound the Mill’s proposition thoughts, and try to explore the profound significance and enlightenment for contemporary researches on proposition. In the same sense, it aims at representing the value of Mill’s thoughts on proposition and the important role played by Mill in the history of European logic.