Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/169

Rh the reasoning powers seemed, as nearly as we could judge, merely to be conscious of the contradiction between this statement and statements to the contrary which they had previously met with; that is, no images were called up, and very likely only verbal formulas regarding the value of logic were suggested, if anything more than a bare 'feeling of dissent' was present. In so far as we get any information from our results, the consciousness of the falsity of a statement may involve (i) a vague feeling of dissent or negation, (2) a feeling of incongruity or incompatibility between the subject and predicate of the statement; (3) a feeling of incongruity or incompatibility between some idea contained in the statement and other ideas not contained in it but suggested by it. Whatever its nature, evidently the consciousness of the falsity of one of the statements in an argument is something aside from the process of reasoning involved in the argument itself; the statement would be unpleasant on account of its untruth even if it stood alone and unconnected with the other propositions of a syllogism, just as the content of an idea might be disagreeable although the idea was suggested in isolation.

(c) A sense that something definite has been omitted. In the first syllogism, each one of the three propositions is true. Six of the observers recorded that they experienced unpleasantness from this argument because they thought at once of many other vegetables besides those mentioned in the premises. Here for the first time we have a source of unpleasantness that is truly logical. Only a part of the 'middle term' is referred to in either premise, and the reasoning process, which ought to pass smoothly from minor to middle and from middle to major term, is broken and interrupted by the occurrence to the mind of other ideas, such as those of cabbages and carrots, which are as naturally suggested by the middle term 'vegetables' as is the major term 'trees.' With the occurrence of these other ideas comes a sense that they should have been taken account of in the argument, and a consequent unpleasant affective tone. Four observers found the chief source of unpleasantness in the fourth argument to lie in the thought of other kinds of property being taxable besides private property. Here the discomfort seems to arise from the fact that the thought process, which should pass smoothly along the course: 'church property other than private property not taxed,' is led off from the middle term 'other than private property' to the thought of cases of public property that are taxed. None of the observers, however, reported that they thought of specific instances of public property being taxed; the 'sense of something omitted' was not as definite as in the case of the first syllogism. In (3), the idea of insane people presented itself with more or less definiteness as needing to be taken account of to render the argument logical (not merely to make the conclusion true) in the minds of nineteen of the observers, if we may judge by the fact that this number of them said the word 'only' should be changed to 'all.'

(d) Closely connected with the source of unpleasantness just mentioned is one which may indeed be the same experience in a different stage of development: the sense of a definite lack of equivalence between the terms. For example, in the case of (1), five of the observers said the argument was unpleasant because "two sub-classes of the same class are not necessarily identical," or words to that effect. Seven others found it disagreeable because it involved an attempt to apply the mathematical axiom that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other, where such an application could not be made. In the case of (2), eight persons said that one quality common to two classes did not make them identical, and four put the same idea from