Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/403

Rh complexity. On the other hand, if I can do anything to awaken your interest in the psychological character of these problems, perhaps I may indirectly help to awaken interest in their logical aspect.

Let me repeat the list of the problems to which I have called attention, emphasizing the sense in which each one of them is a psychological problem. I mention the fact that a science which is testing hypotheses deduces the logical consequences of these hypotheses. The process may be an extended one. What is the psychology of deduction? What happens when a process of deduction takes place? In some respects this problem has indeed been repeatedly dealt with from the psychological point of view. I do not wish in the least to deny that the analyses of Professor Pillsbury and others have contributed to this problem, but just because these psychologists have been so little interested in the logic of the deductive process they have failed, in my opinion, to emphasize some of its most important psychological aspects. Yet their own discussions emphasize the need of such a psychology. Here lies the first of the problems to which I now call attention.

Secondly, the pragmatists in speaking of the working hypothesis have emphasized, as Professor Moore has recently done, the fact that the agreement of an assertion or idea with its expected workings constitutes the test of its truth so far as up to a certain point in our investigations we may happen to have gone. I have called attention to the difference between an expectation and an assertion or a denial. One goes to the play expecting amusement. At the end of the play, have his expectations been met or not? The question may be unanswerable in any definite way. The play was amusing, and yet perhaps not so very amusing, or not so amusing as one could have wished it to be. One goes away partially disappointed, partially pleased. One is not so disappointed but that one continues to go to plays over and over again. One is not so pleased that he expresses himself very enthusiastically. What ideas with regard to the amusing character of plays have been precisely tested, so long as one remains in this state of mind? On the other hand, through a deductive process the occurrence of an eclipse is precisely predicted. The eclipse is observed, its beginning is noted with an accuracy as great as the errors of observation permit. A precise assertion is made as to the agreement between the prediction and the observation. When the assertion has received its proper qualifications with regard to probable error and the rest, the assertion appears in the records as true or false. In this case an issue is met and something is tested, yes or no. I now ask, what is the psychology of assertion and denial, of the difference between yes and no? In what way does this difference, namely that between yes and no, differ from any other kind of difference? This problem I mention, without hoping in this paper to do more than mention it. I called attention to this