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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: JEE-JUN |
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JEVONS, WILLIAM STANLEY (1835-1882) , English economist and logician, was born at Liverpool on the 1st of September 1835. His father, Thomas Jevons, a man of strong scientific tastes and a writer on legal and economic subjects, was an iron merchant. His mother was the daughter of William Roscoe. At the age of fifteen he was sent to London to attend University College school. He appears at this time to have already formed the belief that important achievements as a thinker were possible to him, and at more than one critical period in his career this belief was the decisive factor in determining his conduct. To-wards the end of 1853, after having spent two years at University College, where his favourite subjects were chemistry and botany, he unexpectedly received the offer of the assayership to the new mint in Australia. The idea of leaving England was distasteful, but pecuniary considerations had, in consequence of the failure of his father's firm in 1847, become of vital importance, and he accepted the post. He left England for Sydney in June 1854, and remained there for five years. At the end of that period he resigned his appointment, and in the autumn of 1859 entered again as a student at University College, London, proceeding in due course to the B.A. and M.A. degrees of the university of London. He now gave his principal attention to the moral sciences, but his interest
chief
Owens
economy
Owens
economy
Ricardo
Jevons arrived quite early in his career at the doctrines that constituted his most characteristic and original
letter written in 186o; and the germ of his logical principles of the substitution of similars may be found in the view which he propounded in another letter written in 1861, that " philosophy would be found to consist solely in pointing out the likeness of things." The theory of utility above referred to, namely, that the degree of utility of a commodity is some continuous mathematical function of the quantity of the com-modity available, together with the implied doctrine that economics is essentially a mathematical science, took more definite form in a paper on " A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy," written for the British Association in 1862. This paper does not appear to have attracted much attention either in 1862 or on its publication four years later in the Journal of the Statistical Society; and it was not till 1871, when the Theory of Political Economy appeared, that Jevons set forth his doctrines in a fully developed form. It was not till after the publication of this work that Jevons became acquainted with the applications of mathematics to political economy made by earlier writers, notably Antoine Augustin Cournot and H. H. Gossen. The theory of utility was about 187o being independently developed on somewhat similar lines by Carl Menger in Austria and M.E.L. Walras in Switzerland. As regards the discovery of the connexion between value in exchange and final (or marginal) utility, the priority belongs to Gossen, but this in no way detracts from the great importance of the service which Jevons rendered to English economics by his fresh discovery of the principle, and by the way in which he ultimately forced it into notice. In his reaction from the prevailing. view he sometimes expressed himself without due qualification: the declaration, for instance, made at the commencement of the Theory of Political Economy, that " value depends entirely upon utility," lent itself to misinterpretation. But a certain exaggeration of emphasis may be pardoned in a writer seeking to attract the attention of an in-different public. It was not, however, as a theorist dealing with the fundamental data of economic science, but as a brilliant writer on practical economic questions, that Jevons first received general recognition. A Serious Fall in the Value of Gold (1863) and The Coal Question (1865) placed him in the front rank as a writer on applied economics and statistics; and he would be remembered as one of the leading economists of the 19th century even had his Theory of Political Economy never been written. Amongst his economic works may be mentioned Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875), written in a popular style, and descriptive rather than theoretical, but wonderfully fresh and original
drawn
Jevons's work in logic went on pari passu with his work in political economy. In 1864 he published a small volume, entitled Pure Logic; or, the Logic of Quality apart from Quantity, which was based on Boole's system of logic, but freed from what he considered the false mathematical dress of that system. In the years immediately following he devoted considerable attention to the construction of a logical machine, exhibited before the Royal Society in 187o, by means of which the conclusion derivable from any given set of premisses could be mechanically obtained. In 1866 what he regarded as the great and universal principle of all reasoning dawned upon him; and in 1869 he published a sketch of this fundamental doctrine under the title of The Substitution of Similars. He expressed the principle in its simplest form as follows: " Whatever is true of a thing is true of its like," and he worked out in detail its various applications. In the following year appeared the Elementary Lessons on Logic, which soon became the most widely read elementary textbook on logic in the English language. In the meantime he was engaged upon a much more important logical treatise, which appeared in 1874 under the title of The Principles of Science. In this work Jevons embodied the substance of his earlier works on pure logic and the substitution of similars; he also enunciated and developed the view that induction is simply an inverse employment of deduction; he treated in a luminous manner the general theory of probability, and the relation between probability and induction; and his knowledge of the various natural sciences enabled him throughout to relieve the abstract character of logical doctrine by concrete scientific illustrations, often worked out in great detail. Jevons's general theory of induction was a revival of the theory laid down by Whewell and criticized by Mill; but it was put in a new form, and was free from .some of the non-essential adjuncts which rendered Whewell's exposition open to attack. The work as a whole was one of the most notable contributions to logical doctrine that appeared in Great Britain in the 19th century. His Studies in Deductive Logic, consisting mainly of exercises and problems for the use of students, was published in r880. In 1877 and the following years Jevons contributed to the Contemporary Review some articles on J. S. Mill, which he had intended to supplement by further articles, and eventually publish in a volume as a criticism of Mill's philosophy. These articles and one other were republished after Jevons's death, together with his earlier logical treatises, in a volume, entitled Pure Logic, and other Minor TForks. The criticisms on Mill contain much that is ingenious and much that is forcible, but on the whole they cannot be regarded as taking rank with Jevons's other work. His strength lay in his power as an original thinker rather than as a critic; and he will be remembered by his constructive work as logician, economist and statistician. See Letters and Journal of W. Stanley Jevons, edited by his wife (1886). This work contains a bibliography of Jevons's writings. See also LOGIC: History. (J. N. K.) End of Article: JEVONS, WILLIAM STANLEY (1835-1882) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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