The relativity of knowledge

pp. 154-170

in: Geoffrey Scarre, Logic and reality in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Berlin, Springer, 1989

Abstract

Mill's denial that any items of human knowledge are justifiable through the operation of rational faculties affording a priori insight into truth represents one major strand of his empiricism. Here his quarrel was with a priorist views about the mode in which certain things which human beings know are warranted. He did not dispute that we do have genuine knowledge about logic and mathematics, but he challenged the notion that the basis of that knowledge lies in any kind of a priori intuition. We saw that he was willing to allow that some propositions of logic may be beneath the call for justification altogether; but he never ceased to insist that experience alone could provide a justification for those propositions which required one.